I’ve been in therapy for years and it is very much accumulated stress. At this point I don’t know what other stress I can cut out, so I figured of maybe I could lessen the impact across the board it might help. Like if I could compress my stress so it takes up less resources.
I’ve also been through therapy for years, although not currently. IDK whether it’s true or not but for me personally I feel as though therapy can deteriorate from a short, sharp, beneficial “intervention” (which is very helpful) into a malaise of relating ones problems to a friendly ear (which is unproductive) … but I digress.
This sounds to me like one of those problems which is a symptom potentially caused by a myriad of different issues, and as such has no specific “cure”. As you’ve said it’s “accumulated stress”, which is another way of saying the same thing. I feel like I run into this type of problem a lot: the solution is really easy, I just need to do better at life!
My one suggestion would be to look at therapies for anxiety, since anger and anxiety are commonly symptoms of the same problem. There’s two common therapies for this.
Firstly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) - figuring out why your thoughts follow the patterns they do and as a result, learning how to change those patterns. This is hard work. It’s a bit like going to a gym. You need to set aside time for several sessions a week of examining the parts of yourself you’ve been trying not to think about your entire life. The gold standard for DIY CBT is “When Panic Attacks” by David Burns, alternatively “feeling great” by the same author. He has a podcast also. I know the dirty dog feet was just an off hand example, but to continue that example you might discover that you have a deeply held belief that people who have dirty houses end up sad lonely and unloved, a potential solution might be to tell someone who you feel is happy and well loved how difficult it is to keep a clean house - inevitably they will agree with you and tell you how hard they find keeping up with their chores.
Secondly Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) - accepting that stressors will always be present, understand that they’re harmless, fleeting thoughts, and committing to a course of action that is more meaningful than simply “avoiding stress”. Author Steven Hayes is the gold standard here but personally I find his stuff too heavy. I quite like “DARE” by Barry McDonagh, basically ACT but more easily digested. This one is more readily applied “in the moment”. It takes practice but there’s no sitting and pondering one’s soul so-to-speak. This is very difficult to explain in a sentence but you might acknowledge, in the moment, that dirty dog feet are infuriating, you feel that feeling, allow it to come. What you’ll find (with anxiety at least) is that if you don’t resist it but regard it with a welcoming curiosity, it will dissipate fairly quickly and leave you with a kind of energised readiness. “Well that was a thing!”. If feeling frustrated is a natural response, and you fight with yourself not to feel that, it creates an incredible tension - you push the feelings away and they just push back harder. You kind of learn to let the frustration come feel the feelings in a healthy way.
How new is ACT therapy? Is it more prevalent nowadays in comparison with CBT? CBT seemed to be a hugely popular “trend” and it always seemed to not make much sense to me.
CBT was definitely a trend because it’s easy to administer and it absolutely works for certain things. It worked wonders for me with panic attacks, and it’s child DBT is the only known effective treatment for BPD last I heard, but it solves specific problems namely irrational and harmful thought patterns
I would like to add EMDR to the list of therapies. Ive been through CBT and ACT and learned some coping skills there. EMDR is considered a bit ‘advanced’ in that a person needs CBT-like skills and self-awareness for it to really work.
I’ll admit it seems like woo-woo to my overly logical brain. But I cannot deny the real permanent breakthroughs in learning to more efficiently recognize and process distressing emotions.
If your therapist isn’t doing as well as you feel they could be,don’t feel bad about finding a new one, hell, you can just schedule an appointment with another one without quitting your current one, just to try it out
Also searching for #sup in Mastodon has been a good way to find information about developments. Not so necessary now that there's an official account I guess. :)
I am unreasonably excited about this. Where I live, there’s no decent options for Internet or cell signal. Which means normal calling/texting doesn’t work, and regular Wi-Fi calling/texting is choppy at the best of times. My whole family uses WhatsApp for everything. I’m hoping I can get them to switch to something like this once it’s stable.
Not the solution I was hoping for but it’s an extremely reasonable compromise. I’ve never heard of selective authorized fetch. Pretty sure he just invented it.
Authorized Fetch has been a thing for a bit on Mastodon at least - but as far as I can see it’s a global toggle rather than saying “If you present as a domain on the blocklist then you must be authorized to fetch this resource” (the selective authorized fetch I assume they’re talking about).
Never used Akkoma though, so I can’t speak for it.
Unless I’m wrong, the unique thing here is that auth fetch is always off for the server. It’s on only at the user level and it’s only on at that level if a user has an active domain block.
That could actually solve a lot of problems for people. Admins are reluctant to enable it server-wide because it causes a bunch of problems. The biggest being that it breaks federation with servers running older software (Mastodon v <3.0 I think) and with other services (Pleroma, maybe others). It also uses more server resources. But there are always people who think it’s worth it.
I think most Mastodon instances also simply silence Threads: Mastodon users can follow Threads users, but Threads won’t fill every algorithmic timeline and doesn’t get suggested.
Unfortunately, neither Lemmy nor Kbin have such a feature, though Lemmy’s user side server blocking introduced in 0.19.0 should help a little.
All true, and making this a feature would simply be implementing the inverse of the new capability… overriding an instance level block instead of imposing one not already at the server level.
I don’t think instance level blocks should be overridden. Some blocks are the result of moderation disagreements (beehaw vs lemmy.world vs exploding-heads vs hexbear), others are because of NSFW content, but there are a bunch of Fediverse servers full of pornography that would be illegal to host in many countries around the world (lolicon porn, for instance). If an administrator doesn’t want that trash on their server, they should have the ability to block it.
I think there’s a significant difference between completely blocking off a remote instance and making all interactions with said instance opt-in, and the server administrator should always have the final word. I think leaving the moderation on a separate layer like Nostr and Bluesky do it (not that Bluesky is federating at the moment) was a mistake, the result of some laudable free speech ideals that just don’t work out in the real world.
I think you only made a case for having two or more levels of instance block, that already exist. One due to objectionable/illegal material that cannot be overridden, and another for something like threads where a significant number of users may not want to be opted in automatically, or want to block it due to purely ideological, non-illegal reasons, which would effectively be put in place by automatically adding the instance block to user accounts that can be removed at any time, which arguably can already be done with minor changes. That’s essentially what dansup is doing, complete with including a command for Pixelfed instance admins to apply the optional block to all user accounts.
That’s not how Bluesky does it. Sure it empowers users which is great but if there is a PDS for example with lolicon, one I don’t see it making past the content filters but if it did the BGS/Relay would blacklist that PDS
I’m pro federate, but honestly, this seems fair. However Lemmy wouldn’t need it, as to see a threads post on lemmy, the person would have to @ the lemmy community in their post.
I think limiting/silencing is an excellent solution. It gives the people who want to interact with Threads a chance, while not disturbing the people who don’t.
In regards to Lemmy: I’ve seen a few Mastodon users tag Lemmy communities and creating posts here (generating some hilariously broken Markdown titles in the process), so we may see a few posts here or there. I don’t think anyone over at Threads knows what the Threadiverse is, though, so it shouldn’t cause any problems.
No Man’s Sky was wildly successful at launch, making the devs a ton of money. I guess they felt bad about not delivering on their promises, so they used that money to fund further development.
It's mostly a solo game. You explore, build bases, buy and upgrade ships and tools/weapons, and other assorted stuff. More than anything else, it's a cool random planet generator, so you travel around checking out planets until eventually that gets boring, which might happen soon, of after a couple hundred hours.
I used to work overnights and that is exactly what happened. In fall you work an extra hour and get an hour of overtime. In spring your shift would be an hour shorter. The company I worked for still paid us that hour so we got paid for an hour we didn’t actually work which was nice.
Taking some simple napkin math, I have a 1min 1080p video downloaded from YT. It clocks in at 15MB.
So, Gamer’s Nexus has 2.6k videos. (That’s insane, btw, but fairly large channel, not even LTT size though).
Assuming just 1080p, and let’s say about 10min average per video. (Some are less, some are 40+), that’s 150MB per 10min video, and that means it’s 390,000Mb (or 380.86GB) for their collection. Assuming I’m wrong and the average is even half of that, and the average GN video is only 5 minutes that’s still 190GB. And that isn’t counting 4k, or the multiple other formats to optimize streaming (720, 480, 360, misc bitrates, etc)
And that’s just storage, not even taking into account compute! (Or egress, or transcriptions, or scaling, or…)
Really for something like Peertube to take off it will require each channel to spin up their own instance, which honestly is just another expense for them, one that Youtube does for them for free, plus Youtube offers to pay them. Which, would cut down on some of the chaff (only people who want to do it would do it), but yeah, I don’t think it’s going to replace YT at any point. Smaller channels can combine for sure, but there is definitely a threshold where it becomes extremely costly.
I’m all for the fediverse, but video streaming is freaking costly and expensive. There’s definitely a reason youtube has a monopoly on it. Now this isn’t to discourage, but more for anyone who may be thinking "yeah why doesn’t peertube just replace it?)
Peertube does allow downloading from peers like bittorrent. But you still need to host the whole video, it only would alleviate data transfer. And I don’t think you’d want to not host the video and rely entirely on people sharing your video and continuing to seed it for it to be available. So for running a channel or sharing videos that you have produced you will still need to host the files somewhere.
Nice idea, but then everytime a video that contains anything licensed by the content mafia is uploaded (even partly), the user in question breaks that license opening themselves up to lawsuits.
In a perfect world where only properly free content is shared that model would work. But that is not how most content shared on YouTube looks like.
A long time ago I read a paper how to mitigate this. Without remembering the details, the idea was: 1. One peer never holds a complete file, only parts of it. 2. You need a key to find all parts of the file and get them in the right order. So Disney can only accuse you of having an incomplete and unusable part of their movie.
But copyrighted material is only one issue. Do you want your hardware to be used for distributing depictions of sexual abuse, or inciting hatred and violence? Any YouTube replacement will need strong moderation tools.
But copyrighted material is only one issue. Do you want your hardware to be used for distributing depictions of sexual abuse, or inciting hatred and violence? Any YouTube replacement will need strong moderation tools.
The concept is that will only happen if you have watched that video depicting sexual abuse, because your peertube client (the website) won’t download videos you didn’t watch.
I was thinking of a hypothetical system were peers provide storage for creators independently of what they are watching (in response to ‘videos take too much storage for individuals to host’ comment. For peertube, you are right.
That is essentially how bittorrent works anyway. In Germany people lost in court over this. Also portions of a copyrighted file are a problem. If they can “proof” that they got a relevant portion (more than the typical fair use seconds) you are still on the hook.
‘Landgericht Hamburg’ proofing will be hard, admittedly. But doesn’t BT just split up a file in x parts, so each part is watchable? What if you sliced differently, like every 100th byte of a file? Or even bitwise slicing? Not one 600 s snippet but 60000 10 ms snippets from throughout the movie.
That could help, but if a file is not shared that much (yet) or not many people are online at the moment, a single peer will still share many more parts, likely ending up with having shared significant amounts.
You are vastly overestimating the amount of storage you need since you are looking at some download which itself has to choose the encoding (which is independent of whatever youtube does: youtube absolutely crushes the quality).
Most estimates assume that youtube has 1 exabyte of storage, let's say we buy this in bulk from retail (which we wouldn't do: you wait as long as possible since storage prices are going down and retail stores would give you the finger if you ordered and exabyte worth).
Let's take that number and run with it:
Buying retail, you can get Seagate Exos X20 20TB drives for 280€, 1 exabyte is 1Mio terabyte, meaning we have 1_000_000/20 * 280 = 14 Mio € (you'd need machines to put those into but you also wouldn't buy the entire thing upfront, and using retail prices either).
Compute also isn't that big of a deal if you do it correctly: the expensive part in video hosting is usually video encoding since to get small video sizes you need to spend compute beforehand to compress it.
However, you can shift this in significant parts to the user by implementing the transcoding in WASM and running this clientside (see e.g. https://www.w3.org/2021/03/media-production-workshop/talks/qiang-fu-video-transcoding.html) in that case users would compress locally in the browser before uploading (this presumably wouldn't even take longer than normal uploads for most people since you trade off transcoding time against upload time).
There are still other compute expenses but those are much more limited.
These mechanisms don't (at least to my knowledge) exist in peertube yet, but would be possible.
The actually expensive part is always the actual networking: Networking is one of the few things that actually get more expensive at scale due to the complexity explosion, rather than cheaper (e.g. having dedicated transcoding hardware drops in price per user since you have higher utilization).
Networking quickly runs into bottlenecks where you have to account for all the covariances between datasets in the network.
Basically to increase the amount of e.g. storage available everything in the network needs to be increased (from the local machines connections, over the cables and switches up to routers and outgoing connections) due to you increasing the density at one point, you have to increase the network everywhere.
That's why networking dwarfs everything: you just get crushed by networking being the bottleneck between your increasingly dense devices.
The clue behind peertube is that this is not as extreme of an effect due to
federation (certain connections just aren't dense due to the overall network topology being distributed)
torrents
The latter is the important part: instead of having network cost rising (super) linearly to the amount of users you have it rise linearly to the amount of simultaneous unique videos.
This is a much smaller number which means you do not need to compete in that space, which is the dominant cost factor. (if you have a method where one user can retain the video and share it without actively watching that same video, you can probably get real-world sublinear scaling)
Mind you, the costs involved here are still large, but not insurmountably large, especially considering there is not one unique organisation that would have to pay for the entire thing and its not an upfront expense. Fundamentally though the system is built such that it won't be crushed as users flood into the network.
That’s why it needs to be an international project. Paid by every country together. Sure some will initially have to pay more but sooner or later everyone wants to be part of it and pay their part.
380 GB in storage for multiple years of contents is really not much. I archive that amount every 2 months.
The real problem is serving all that content to the viewers, and the first bottleneck is usually the upload bandwidth.
I think the more interesting number would be to know how much data would it be to upload an average sized video to every viewer of it.
Using your example of a 15 MB video, serving that to 300.000 viewers means uploading roughly 4,5 TB data, plus some for technical data (TCP/IP and HTTP headers and such). For every (average) video! Now that’s a lot!
Fortunately PeerTube helps with that: viewers will automatically upload their downloaded chunks of the video to the others currently viewing it, so in the end the server needs somewhat less bandwidth usage.
Other than that, it would be the perfect place where channels could team up to host shared instances for themselves, or every channel their own one but with redundancy set up, so that their friend channels could also chip in with the bandwidth when needed.
Yeah, storage and bandwidth are massive considerations and there’s no way Peertube can handle it. And each channel running their own instance actually makes it worse, since you’re going to have smaller entities who can’t take advantage of deals that larger companies can make for hardware, data centers, bandwidth, etc. Plus, if you’re having to run your own instance to have a channel, then you’re not just focusing on creating videos for the channel, now you’re also a system architect, sysadmin, etc. It makes it a massive barrier to entry, and one that only tech enthusiasts will even consider tackling.
But even say that happens: a bunch of people running their own instances for their channel. Where are they hosting it? Are they purchasing their own hardware? Running their own data centers? They’re most certainly not running it out of their home. The overhead for that kind of operation is massive. What you’ll end up with is a bunch of people running their instances on AWS or some other PaaS provider. And then you’re right back to the problem you’re trying to solve with a distributed service: that the service is consolidated on one platform (even if it doesn’t appear that way to the end user). Sure, AWS et al aren’t dictating the terms of service for your Peertube instance, but the instance is dependent on that platform.
On top of all that, you have the issue of monetization. How are you going to make money from your channel? Peertube doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure of advertising etc. that YT has.
You also have another massive issue: legal. YT spent over a decade going through the courts with the MPAA, RIAA, et al fighting about copyright issues. Google has massive amounts of money and was able to weather that fight. But it’s competitors didn’t. Which is why you don’t have Vimeo stars, for example.
Running a YT channel is a massive time, energy, and money sink. Add all of these other considerations to it, and it’s an impossible task. It’s hard to think someone would could see PT as a viable alternative. Google destroyed all of the competition (or let attrition do it for them), and pulled the ladder up behind them.
I didn’t even think about the personal risk, which I do know because I run a lemmy instance. You hit the nail on the head, I either see it as:
Individual creators host their own, where they can host all they want, but there is no money to be made, in fact there is only money to be lost, so it’d end up being an insane amount of ads and sponsored content
Group servers like we have, but they’re only good until a tipping point to be honest, if they started getting a fraction of youtube content we’ll see them lock down uploads, and most will shut down if they get hit by one of the acronym agencies.
I love the fediverse, but I was a professional in the video world too, and video is heavy. Everything about it is crazy, take all the scaling problems and quadruple them. I hope peertube can find something that works
If the company tells the union to fuck off, all of the workers who belong to that union walk off the job and the employer has to run short handed or shut down production.
The union is the workers joining together so that they have more bargaining power - all the people who know how the business works are sitting idle. Can the business afford to replace and retrain them all?
If the company tells the union to fuck off, all of the workers who belong to that union walk off the job and the employer has to run short handed or shut down production.
or hire scabs. (which… heh. leads to bullshit QC.) (don’t be a scab…)
Yeah I didn’t really connect the dots that my penis had been altered. I thought my friend had the weird penis. Turns out his is the way it’s supposed to be.
Carbon offsets are a scam. John Oliver did a piece on them last year. Lots of it goes to existing forests (which doesn’t help offset new carbon usage) or to the development of mono-culture forests which have all sorts of issues.
Donating to charities might be a better idea. I’ll look into this. I think people nowadays underestimate the effectiveness of charities. Some aren’t efficient, but some have been highly effective.
The way that I’m contributing is my reducing my own usage. I don’t drive a car (electric bike or public transport) I removed the gas supply from my house, signed up with a renewable energy supplier, insulated the ever living shit out of my house including triple glazed glass and installed a Heatpump. Cost a small fortune but I can say I put my money where my mouth is!
Forests do not offset carbon emissions unless the trees never decay. Unless you’re burying them underground after you cut them down, this method is not removing carbon from the atmosphere.
I think the takeaway from that episode is that many carbon offsets are scams, not necessarily all. So don’t take corporate claims that they offset their emissions at face value, and consider carefully before you buy offsets.
Take a look at my other comment about Wren and Wendover Productions. (This John Oliver episode happens to include an excerpt from the Wendover piece I mentioned.)
Second this, I recall reading up on mono-culture forests. I forget the source (maybe NYT) but the writer spoke of volunteering in Canada to plant trees and their practices basically planted incredibly combustible trees in very close proximity to one another. Those mono-culture forests are one of several reasons Canadian wild fires got out of control.
Wish I could the source, if anyone else remembers feel free to add.
Advertisements are not there for you to immediately buy something or even buy something in the next few days. Advertisements are there to associate a company with a product or service.
If you see an advert for washing powder the advertisers are not expecting you to head to the store and get some, just next time you think you should try a different brand of powder a memory circuit fires off in your brain saying “what about Fab or Omo?”
There was a show on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation years ago called The Gruen Transfer where advertisers would discuss each other’s ads and kinda pulls back the voodoo on advertising.
People learning about your product or service is the big battle of commerce.
At one end of the spectrum, you have a company like Sriracha, $0 spent on advertising. They had faith that word of mouth would suffice.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have McDonald’s. McDonald’s was advertising on billboards in videogames, in the 2000s. Ask 1 billion people to name 5 burger joints.
Yeah some jackass I’m at once in marketing tried to explain it to me. I haven’t seen an ad in ages so I call bullshit. It’s all mostly psychobabble nonsense.
are not expecting you to head to the store and get some, just next time you think you should try a different brand of powder a memory circuit fires off in your brain saying “what about Fab or Omo?”
That’s still secondary, I think. Advertising is mostly about getting the stores to stock it so that you can buy it.
I just signed up at open.audio . This is pretty lackluster for the moment but has tremendous potential. Thank you so much for letting me know of it! :)
does stealing it count? because that would be a boxed copy of redhat linux from best buy in the late 90s/early 2000s. yes, i found a way to steal linux
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Even if I pay for a product I love some asshole suit is going to get a bigger cut than the artists who did the work.
not ideal, you know, I would prefer it if creators had pay links attached to their accounts and you could anonymously send them money. Pirate something, pay the creator some money if you can. I mean, if enough people do it, the corps would be forced to change the game.
The thing that would change is that we won’t have movies where 500 people worked on who do it to get a paycheck, but instead 5-20 people who are really passionate about it.
I’m an indie author, and all my novels ended up on PDFdrive.
Not that I’d be mad about it. If someone pirates my books and likes them, maybe they’ll support me in the future.
Just saying, I’m not wearing suits. I’m working full-time and write when I have off and got the time and energy.
For us Indies, getting eyeballs on our books is next to impossible anyways, so I already gave up on the idea that writing will ever be more than an expensive hobby.
If we had any sense as a species we would be funding artists so that they can pursue their art full time. Industry advances technology, but art advances the mind.
We might end up like people who do graphics… replaced by AI tools. There aren’t any that make it as easy yet (and maybe there won’t), but who knows where tech will lead us.
If you do it as a hobby, you don’t need to worry about it so much, but it does take something away for sure.
AI will change the game, but I think after an initial period of growing pains that we’re really facing a shift in the economy whether we’re ready or not. All of the “problems” of capitalism have been due to runaway efficiency. A scarcity economy is absurd when we’re infinitely capable of producing everything people want or need.
I agree, and the optimist in me desperately wants to experience a post-scarcity society like the one we’re seeing in the The Culture books, where AIs run the world, and we humans are free to chase whatever it is we’re dreaming of.
Maybe that’s a romantic notion, but I’m hesitant to give up on in. Dreams are what’s kept us going for the past millennia.
We are biologically designed to reproduce. So our current purpose is to survive until we’re grown to sexual maturity, reproduce, then raise our offspring to a stage where they’re able to survive on their own. Then, we either do it again, if we’re still young enough, or die and make room for the next generation. That seems like a very depressing purpose to me, but this is how evolution works.
I think that we now have the intellectual capacity to transcendent this cycle. We’ve been for a while, and we formed societies, developed technology. Our first models were small tribes, very much hippie-like little communities, that suffered from attrition by tribe warfare and rule of the strongest, where reproduction was controlled by “the fittest”. Then we developed monarchic systems that provided a much more stable life for everyone, but ran on servitude (slavery) of peasants. We experimented with systems like communism, that then lead to terror by the ruling class (can still see that in China today), and landed on a somewhat democracy-adjacent system of capitalism that we’re running today, and that’s not sustainable, because we’re destroying our planet.
What’s next, and what purpose for the individual do you have in mind?
You don’t need a purpose and in fact most of the purpose people identify with are rather unnecessary for lack of better word. But people without some feeling of purpose are definately more prone to depression. Countries like Mexico should be less happy being people have far less wealth and have to work harder but the opposite it true. I find people are overall more happy and content. Now I would normal discount my experiences as being limited but if you look at the suicide rate of say the US to Mexico, the US has 4 times the rate.
This is actually true for nearly every developed to developing nations and I think speaks a great deal about human nature.
Okay, so what you’re saying is that you think friction creates a sense of purpose. That might be true. People in Mexico are probably more happy about little things and enjoy them more, because that’s what they have. Less freedom of choice paradox to contend with, and less free time to sink into depression (I believe in “the olden times”, people were just too tired from fighting to survive to sit down and have an existential crisis). That sounds like a valid idea and is supporting your point.
The question is, how can we combine my (borrowed from the Culture series) idea of a post scarcity society with your idea of a psychological need for friction? Do you think it’s impossible to simulate the same feeling of need for something to result in the same strain that then causes happiness?
First I will say the culture series is one of favorite books. But I would start by suggesting a post scarcity society would be difficult in the limited size of our solar system. The main reason being resource theory. Like animals with unlimited food, they will grow in population untill there no longer excess food. Humans likely would do the same until there again is a limit of resources and things develop value. Ie. There is a limit of ocean front property thus we will make a reason to toil to better ourselves and get the best view.
But that diverges somewhat from the question you ask. Could we be happy in such a society if it could exsist? If we bring up the culture series, nearly every character in those books have purpose. Actually great purpose in that often they are doing some deed to better humanity. So it is hard to really use that as an example. So the question then becomes could a regular person be fully happy be having all their needs met and not having to do anything? I rather think of the hedonism bot in Futurama. He does nothing all day but all his needs are met. He has to expend zero energy. To me that seems quite depressing. I would rather be doing something to better myself and overall other people but in a post scarcity society there is nothing physically anyone would need thus there would be little I can contribute. Now could there be a true post scarcity society? I suggest not While money should not exsist, there will still be currency. That will be in the form of fame or talent or power. Creative people will be in demand and trade that for favors. Actors same in that they will gain favor. People in power will use their influence to have access to interests that others may not. But these people would be the minority. The majority of people always will be your average Joe. Will they be happy just comfortable exsisting? Honestly I really don’t know. Maybe we can evolve to that.
I will bring up one other point. In the history of humanity, during times of great difficulties are also the times when humans evolved the fastest. Could the opposite occur? If we have all our physical need met, might our overall intelligence decrease. I suspect it might. Then again, might it be better to be dumb and happy than intelligent and depressed?
Yep! Often the math is “the people who pirated probably wouldn’t have bought your product if they couldn’t pirate it, so you didn’t lose anything. But you did gain a reader, who can now recommend it to others, and / or make future purchases themselves”. Generally speaking, pirating isn’t bad to the bottom line (not saying it’s good).
It hurts brick and mortar stores, but then, so do libraries. (Hah)
I’ve always been of the opinion that people who truly love what they piratesd will at some point want the author to carry on writing. Just like someone who just stumbled upon your work by accident. That’s the beauty of humanity, people do remember, and they do care, and creative arts are a pursuit that connects author and reader.
For us Indies, getting eyeballs on our books is next to impossible anyways, so I already gave up on the idea that writing will ever be more than an expensive hobby.
I am sorry to hear that. If it ended up on pdf drive, then I guess it’s either that, enough people want to read it or pdf drive has a bot which is ruthlessly uploading all the books it can find. Have you tried self publishing on kindle? Also, name your books if you want to, it looks like some eyeballs and popularity will do you some good.
I tried on Kindle, but the reality is that every day, a six-digit number of books are being released, which leads to insane odds.
I wrote cyberpunk/urban fantasy crossover books, but am now switching over to space opera. If you’re still interested, I can give you the title of the “entry book” that starts the story.
Agreed. I can say that personally I went back and bought a lot of music that I copied off of my friends’ ipods as a kid. I’m sure it isn’t the norm to go back and buy stuff, but it happens.
Just curious — why do you consider writing to be an expensive hobby? I mean, it’s totally expensive from an opportunity cost perspective, but wouldn’t any hobby be? Is it the cost to get it published somewhere?
If you just write for yourself, it only costs time. If you plan to (*self-) publish it, though, you want at least a good cover, and optimally, you’d hire an editor and maybe things like sensitivity readers. And then, most people seem to prefer audio books these days, which is either expensive, or hard to pull off, due to having to find a narrator who’s okay with royalty share with a non-established author. And then you haven’t advertised your book at all yet.
I’ve so far only worried about cover and editing. Wrote 4 novels. Now I’m writing a series and am considering writing the whole thing completely first, then getting a deal with an artist for all the covers. This also makes it easier to do foreshadowing properly over the course of more than one book, and it’s probably advantageous to stagger book releases, even if that means a few years without putting anything out to the world.
*All these points are moot if you aim to get published by an established house, but then you’re dealing with “the suits”, and people who rank “will it sell” higher than “is it good”.
How expensive does editing and cover art get? I imagine it’s pretty pricey to hire people to do that. You mention this is moot going the traditional publishing route — I guess because publishers will front the costs for these things if they think your book will sell? If you’re buying cover art and stuff to self-publish, where do you publish your novels? Do you sell print copies, or is it all digital? Is selling physical copies even feasible without a traditional publisher?
The cover costs anywhere from USD 100 to 1000, depending on the artist and the cover, where 100 would get you a somewhat decent one on Fiverr, while something not generic can go up in price very quickly. Most “cheap” artists have a flat rate with one or more stock image sites, where you’d then pick a model and tell them what setting you’d like to have. If you have very specific needs that would require hand crafting, the sky is your limit (The covers for ebook, print and audiobook are separate, and print/audiobook covers will cost extra).
Editors come in categories. Developmental editors check the characters and plot for consistency, logic problems and structural things. Then there are copywriting editors that focus mainly on things like grammar, spelling etc and, while being a bit cheaper, still cost quite a lot (Which is why people use tools like grammarly or pwa to self-edit, which basically saves you the copy editor).
Sensitivity and beta readers are tricky. If you already have a fan community, you might be able to recruit some of them for this purpose. You’d want them to avoid faux pas when describing people of another ethnicity, sex, gender etc, and there are professional options for that, too (I already suspect my current project might not be fireproof, because names like Born Of Rain remind Americans of natives, even though they’re completely unrelated to my story – there aren’t even humans in my book).
Audiobook narration can go way, way up. You might be able to negotiate royalty share with a new voice actor who needs gigs to build skills and a portfolio, but nobody wants to spend hours every day for weeks in a recording booth if there’s no money to be made, and therein lies the problem – you need exposure to sell your books and make some money back, but exposure doesn’t come for free. While less and less people read books, they do listen to audiobooks, which would increase your chances of being seen drastically.
Newcomers don’t usually have a backlog of ten books, with lots of positive reviews, but most people don’t buy books from some dude with two books and zero reviews. They also don’t buy books that don’t have a nice cover, and they demand the professional quality you’re getting from having your book edited by an expert. Some genres also just sell better in general, like romance or thriller (to a lesser extent).
If you go with just a cheap Fiverr cover and some basic copywriter editing, you’re already looking at approximately 1 grand, with sales extremely unlikely, unless you have a platform somewhere with a related following (you often see book-related youtubers advertising their books during their videos). For someone like me, who has 3 books out (Out of 4 – I pulled my first novel, wasn’t satisfied with the book), writing something like science fiction, which doesn’t have a ravenous market, that means you calculate with 100% loss and are happy if you sell 10 units.
Indies often rely on things like Facebook/Google ads, newsletter and heavy social media marketing, all of which I hate with a passion. But it’s “part of the business”, which makes it a very unpleasant endeavor for me, and I’ve so far not done any marketing at all, which basically guarantees I’ll stay an obscure writer in the hobbyist league, one small fish in an endless ocean. And that’s okay.
If you think of traditional publishing, you have “the big 4” in the USA, and some foreign houses elsewhere, and you need an agent. Agents take a cut of anything you might earn, and they’re not optional. An agent helps with some very basic plot doctoring, and most publishing houses won’t even look at your manuscript if you send it in directly. Even with an agent, even if they’re well-connected, there’s a high chance your book will end up on the slush pile and never be seen. Not because editors are malicious, but because they’re overwhelmed. You wouldn’t believe the amount of books people put out every day, with a large percentage being unacceptable.
Agents, and editors at publishing houses, look for something they think sells. They’re notoriously bad at predicting trends, but they are the ones who decide what gets published and what not. Remember the vampire hype? Then the “magic academy” boom? Editors tried to create an “angel hype” with very lacklustre success.
If you’re lucky and write a book that falls into a category editors are looking for right now, they will then assign development and copywriting editors who work with you and tell you how to get the book in shape. They’ll get a cover made (over which you have zero control, even if your name is Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson) and pay you a 5k advance, with a small percentage of the sales if and after your book makes the advance back (and if it doesn’t, your pen name is burned).
It takes me about 3 months to write a book, which is just the writing. The planning can take weeks or months, depending on the setting, the characters, the plot and how far you lean on the planner-pantser-spectrum. If you just count the writing hours, a 5k advance means below minimum wage, so you won’t live off your books. Add to that the high barrier of entry and the other activities like marketing, in which you will have to participate especially as a new author, and you’ll see a very skewed effort/reward ratio.
Traditional publishing used to be more competitive, and until a few years ago the Big4 were the Big5. There also used to be a mid-list, the kind of author who could work as a writer full time, barely profitable, and usually paid for with profits from star authors’ sales, in the hopes that one of their books breaks through. G.R.R. Martin was such a mid-lister for decades. The trend though has been to abandon that concept completely and fully focus on the established star authors, and on cheap newcomers who hopefully sell their books themselves by somehow going viral on TikTok.
That’s why I said I see it as an expensive hobby, and why I don’t mind being pirated. I want to be in creative control of my work, get a cover I like, tell the story I have in mind, without deadline or the pressure of having to sell.
I want to be read, not to sell; readers, not customers. So if someone puts it up for free, cool. Not that I could do anything about it anyway.
That all makes a lot of sense. If I’m reading you right it sounds like you do make a profit, but you’re making much less than minimum wage? Or has it been not profitable at all and a loss in that sense? You at least mentioned that new authors go in expecting it to be a total loss, which makes it sound like it could be sensible to put the writing online (basically free self-publishing), at least if the point is just to have people read it, and you’ll make a loss from a more properly published thing anyway (although it sounds like your biggest costs are editing / audiobooks / covers which maybe you consider an important part of the work in the first place). That said I feel like the internet has changed quite a lot and people don’t really follow specific creators and their websites so much anymore.
Yeah, I’m an Indie, I do self publishing without advertising. I’m spending more than I make.
The problem with putting your stuff online is, the pages that specialize in that and have it all set up and ready to go are mostly fanfiction and romance, so you won’t get a lot of reads there, either.
I guess I could just upload my books on GDrive and put download links on my website. Haven’t thought about that deeply yet. But I do write books, not blog posts or diary entries, and I like to have them in a neat package with proper presentation, in a format ebook reader apps can display painlessly. Nobody wants to read 70-100k word novels on a website ;)
Sometimes, when it’s particularly impactful. But you can save your shaming for somebody who cares about your opinion. The fact that you’ve given me more attention than anybody with the power to change things shows where your allegiance lies.
I don’t know what you mean by “allegiance”, you were talking about ethics and that authors don’t get what they deserve. Your problem was not compensation itself but that some people that you don’t think deserve it get a bigger cut than you’re comfortable with.
It logically follows that in this frame of mind the ethical thing to do is to cut out the middle man and compensate the original author for their work directly.
I don’t know what kind of box you put me into based on one sentence but not everyone is out to get you who doesn’t 100% agree with you. This is why civil discussion is not possible online anymore.
Not completely true. Are there shot pirates yes, just like there are shit uploaders that think it’s fun to bundle a computer virus with downloadable content.
If it’s something new, like a new book or movie, I will pay for it. The movies/shows I pirate are old and mostly out of circulation, unless they are streaming on some service. I pay for those so their is monetary transactions.
For example, I just recently spent 2 days downloading CHiPs original tv series, even with my high speed broadband it was that slow because there aren’t that many people offering it. Took me 3 days to find it to dl.
Not all piracy is bad. New stuff, ok not cool. But older stuff that has had a good run, the loss of revenue to creator/publisher is so minimal that they won’t feel it.
I’m an ethical pirate, if I think it’s worth watching over and over again I’ll buy it, if it’s available. I won’t pirate software or books.
I have kindle for reading and there is nothing new worth downloading software wise, plus I use linux on my computer, so all my software is free anyway, and if I can’t donate financially I find other ways to help. I’m not a big gamer and when I do game it’s on console, so I do pay for that.
I’m not some kind of activist set out to undermine your movement, I asked a question. This is an online forum where anyone can comment, if you feel like it’s wasting your time then don’t answer.
when was the last time you sent an email to an elected official?
Last time? A few months ago when a chinese company wanted to build a chemical distribution center in my district.
When I was in university, I watched a movie online using alternative means that I had been kind of interested in, but never went to see. I then watched it again. Then I went out and bought a DVD.
A little after that, I watched a lets play of a game that basically gave the entire experience in a single watch. I liked the game enough that I bought it immediately and just let it sit on my steam library without an install, just so the creator would receive their dues.
A year or so ago, I got a game through a charity bundle and wound up playing hundreds of hours of it. Since the creators got no money from my purchase, I bought merch, and waited for DLC to come out for me to buy instantly, just so they’d get something from me.
Recently, a AAA studio let go a bunch of creators while their game was wrapping up, essentially punishing them for a job well done. The creators will get nothing if I buy the game they made, but the studio that screwed them over will get everything. Just like I always have, I will give as much as they deserve to receive.
I did the same with Chernobyl. Originally watched it with my friends password, but I liked it so much I bought the steel book 4k. If I hadn’t had that shared password they wouldn’t have gotten any money out of me
Sand. It’s coarse and rough and it gets everywhere, but that shouldn’t stop you from learning to swim, it can be made easy. Start by practicing floating and familiarizing yourself with the medium. Being at ease is essential, so stay wherever the waterline reaches your shoulders. Breathing is an important part of the ordeal, because full lungs keep you afloat. Breaststroke and sidestroke are good starting points, whichever resonates more with you. Personally I think sidestroke is better because it’s very smooth and the body falls quite naturally into this position (look it up on youtube for tutorials, it’s very simple). Last but not least, we learn by playing, so have fun. 😀
Well if I’m where it’s at my shoulders, of course I’d be floating because I’d be standing. Otherwise the water proves itself to have other plans no matter what is to be said about it.
Next time you can try lying flat on your back in even less water depth, let’s say around the belly? Try keeping afloat by focusing on your breathing (you can look up inverted breathing), and when you feel like you’re dipping too much, your legs can always correct course by contacting with the floor. It depends on your morphology, but arms extended up and hands above your head works well for me (the position babies sleep in). Then tilt your head backwards a little, chest puffed, let your back arch naturally. That’s my method, you can try it
I can’t help but commend the legitimately useful comment above me, but also, yes.
Yes, swimming is more complicated than I could possibly understand because I knew how to do it before I knew what I was doing. I’m a native English speaker, so I understand privilege, but swimming seems like such a primal thing to not be able to perform. I have a relatively close friend who can not swim and is scared of open water. It’s weird to me. Maybe there’s a privilege to swimming ability in America, but he’s a white dude, so it’s weird.
English wasn’t the language of my first environment, but other than that, nothing about me, ethnically or not, seems to suggest being underprivileged. Maybe it’s just my luck.
I understand that in America, at least, there are certain elements that kept certain people from being able to learn to swim. To me, it wasn’t lessons. I was just around water? Maybe I was too young to remember any formality to me, I was around water, so I learned to swim.
Maybe that’s different from state to state. I grew up in Hessen but don’t remember having mandatory swimming lessons. I learned it mostly on my own so I don’t even have a „Seepferdchen“ and know a few people from NRW who don’t either. I remember there was the option to do it in school but not sure why I didn’t take it then.
Either way, not being able to swim at all is pretty rare in Germany because going to the pool is a popular activity for kids here.
One of my friends is 33 and she and her older sister can’t swim. They grew up on a rural farm far away from any body of water. “Where would we have learned or practiced?” Over the years, I have learned that a lot of people in the US cannot swim, especially when they were poor as kids, even in major cities near water.
I feel like swimming lessons are a bit of a scam anyways. Me and my brother grew up poor. We both can swim perfectly fine. We went to lakes / public pools often while growing up.
Never took any swimming lessons. My parents never did swimming lessons and neither did their parents. Just throw the kid in and let him figure it out while he’s still young. It’s an instinct sort of like dogs.
“Just throw the kid in” This works for just about everything, you’ll be surprised.
Dinner? Just gather the ingredients ( to be fair, they’re still kids ) and throw the kid in. They’ll be a master chef in no time, it’s natural.
But seriously, i also learned by instinct, but i remember lots of kids were cautious of and some were really afraid of water and needed a little teaching and patience. It was part of school here in Germany, no opt-out.
Ever indoor pool I’ve gone to in the UK has offered Swimming lessons. Not having natural bodies of water isn’t a great excuse for basic swimming. Seems to just be a culture difference since everyone I know had lessons at an indoor pool as kids
How much do you think I’m talking about? You’d be spending more going to the cinema then a swimming lesson. Obviously it may not translate but if so then at least we’ve found a cause
There are limited spots for public swim lessons in my city and they are $150 for a set of lessons. If you go the private route, it is generally at least double that.
(Un)surprisingly, the US had lots of public pools, but they got removed because of racism. Definitely affects everyone especially the poor with little means of travel. marketplace.org/…/public-pools-used-to-be-everywh…
If you can’t swim, bring desthly afraid of water is a good survival instinct.
After an incident of near-drowning as a toddler, my parents prioritized swimming lessons in my childhood. I can never remember not being able to swim. However, when I was in the military, there was a survival swimming section where you had to get in a pool with full clothing and a weapon, and swim a length. You were supposed to keep the weapon above water at all time. So you’re doing a side-stroke with one arm holding a 7lb weight above water, in long-sleeved shirt and pants (I recall being grateful no boots or socks). Most of us California boys made it; lots of people didn’t make it with the rifle the whole way, or tapped out without getting anywhere at all. The point is, near the end, when I was exhausted from fighting the water, and it was starting to get hard to keep my head above water, I felt an unexpected panic rising. I can easily believe that if it had gone on much longer, the panic would have taken over and years of swimming experienced would go out the window, and I’d have ended up thrashing futiliy in the water like the guys who dropped out at the start.
Crazy! I was drownproofed as an infant, and was a water baby my whole life. I joined the swim team in highschool and university. That swim test was stupidly easy if you knew how to backstroke. Just hold the weapon above the water in both hands, and kick. Your head will dip below the water, but will come right back out, so breathe then and exhale while your head is under the water.
They made me do it side stroke as well. That was much harder, but I could have kept going for at least 200m (down and back 4 times.)
I had no clue that us competitive swimmers have that much more endurance in the water than the average swimmer.
competitive swimmers have that much more endurance in the water than the average swimmer.
I swam from a young age and did swim team during elementary school, and I was always a strong swimmer but didn’t keep up with training after I quit. One year during uni wrestling cross training we were doing laps in the pool and the women’s polo team was also there at the same time, so our coach told us to go play with them for a bit. Despite both wrestling and polo demanding high endurance and total body fitness the muscles used are completely different and we had a fun session of almost drowning while the ladies shoved us underwater and hucked balls over our submerged heads.
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