This is basically YouTube’s fault. I was one of those who initially did not block the ads to “support” creators I watched, and just used the app. Now they’ve made that completely insufferable and think my alternative is going to be to pay the subscription. Idiots.
First they started kicking you out of incognito and then add whatever you were watching to your account. It used to be that the video you were watching would also close.
Then if you don’t skip the first ad, they play a 5 minute ad after with the most obnoxious shit hoping you’re not there to click.
Then they tripled the amount of ads you have to skip, and making part of them 15-30 seconds unskippable ones. Now ads are about 1/4 of my watch time which is on par with the old cable model.
The straw that broke the camel’s back is now when you open the app, IT AUTO PLAYS SHORTS FULLSCREEN! At least if it was the creators I normally see in my shorts, but now it’s some garbage trending youtuber I don’t know. AND NOW THAT IVE WATCHED 1 SECOND OF IT THEY ARE NOW RECOMMENDED IN MY CONTENT.
I used to juggle accounts to focus the algorithm of certain type of videos for certain accounts, and youtube has completely ruined that too. Fuck that, went with the webapps and skipped the ads entirely. Fuck you youtube, you spat on those who gave you the least trouble. Never going back to the app.
Like, does this approach yt is taking really increase viewership, revenue, watchtime, whatever the metric is?
I seriously can’t imagine, that it works. If you’re savvy enough, you’ll use AdBlock of some kind and for the less techy people it gets insufferable. That can’t be good for yt.
I imagine us taking the high seas is “inconsequential”. Until it isn’t at least, all that matter is quarterly earnings, the rest “is next quarter”.
I suspect it’s like video games, they don’t give a shit if pay to win mechanics drive away interest for the game, they make more than enough off those who do pay. In the long run it will worsen the platform until eventually there will be a crisis (similar to some banana looking motherfucker on reddit), and the CEO of google Sundae Pichu is going to start cutting on pencils and printers at YouTube, while asking government for subsidies lest they slack off a chunk of their workforce and buyback they stock.
The solution for YouTube is right in your comment: it used to be the case that only tech savvy people would install AdBlock.
With more ads though, the incentive to install an ad blocker is suddenly there for more, even not so tech savvy people.
YouTube‘s reaction is already visible as they are now trying to block ad blockers: Try to make it more difficult to get an ad blocker at all, so not as tech savvy people won’t get one and continue to watch ads as they used to.
The thing is, YT is a de facto monopoly. Yes, there are alternatives, but most people don’t know about or use them. I’m not talking about short TikTok-style videos, I’m talking about longer-form video content. Sure, there is stuff and other sites. I go to Vimeo and DailyMotion sometimes to watch things, but YouTube is where the vast majority of the content is. They don’t need to worry about losing viewers right now, because they know viewers have nowhere else to go. So they can do whatever the hell they want. I wish I knew a good solution.
Why is not being able to log in a deal breaker? I imported my subscriptions into it using takeout and that was good enough for me. Although I will admit on youtube I always had search and watch history off, so recommendations have been useless everywhere (intentionally).
Honestly I use the normal YouTube App for logging in and for watching without ads I just use the share button to open that video in NewPipe. Works for me.
I really hate the ones that make you select pictures that contain particular images. Apparently if you do them too fast, they’ll just keep telling you to try again.
Also the anti-fingerprinting in Firefox breaks them. Fucking awesome that I can solve that bullshit just fine and it still won’t validate unless I let some asshole slurp my browser data.
I really hate the ones that make you select pictures that contain particular images.
In a way, those are interesting because you can use them (sometimes retrospectively) to tell what Google or Google's clients are working on. First it was all the text stuff as they digitized old newspapers and books and magazines. Then there was that period when you wanted you to identify stop signs and house numbers and businesses and other stuff like that - all of that fed into Google Maps. Then it was traffic lights and speed limits and stop signs, which was early self-driving. Now it's motorcycles, buses, bridges, and bicycles - all things that were (maybe still are?) proving a challenge for advanced self-driving. The traffic lights and crosswalks fit into this somehow, though I'm not sure if it's self-driving cars, map directions, both, or something else entirely.
I have absolutely no idea what they're doing with fire hydrants, staircases and mountains, though. It'll probably be obvious in retrospect. But anyway, how do you like your life as not only a data point that Google can sell to anyone interested, but also as a cog feeding data into Google's many businesses and helping them solve their identification issues?
It’s illegal to park in front of fire hydrants so you’d want a self-driving car to know that. However, I think Tesla is pretty much the only company using cameras for self-driving cars (rather than lidar/radar), so not sure this is the real reason for the captchas. Knowing where hydrants are would be useful for Google Maps too.
About 15 years on, I’m still so happy I got good coursework marks for the route-finding equivalent of a bogosort. Picked a bunch of random routes and pick the fastest. Sure, that guy who set up a neural net to figure it out did well, but mine didn’t take days of training, and still did about as well in the same sort of execution time.
I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”
It reaffirmed my belief that a healthy portion of either side doesn’t actually have any principles. They just care that their side is winning and the other is losing.
I’m a moderate that a lot of people confuse for a conservative, and I say nail big business to a wall. I think the Microsoft-Activision deal should be declined just on the nature of the size of each business, not because it meets some arbitrary standard of anti-competitive behavior. Businesses as big as Microsoft do not need even bigger market coverage through owning more production houses. The whole point of the anticompetitive corrections is to avoid these giant conglomerates that have their hands in everything.
Microsoft already owns video game production houses. They produce one of the most popular home consoles in the world. They own a lot of the ecosystem that most people use on a daily basis on their pcs, namely Windows OS, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more.
Why does one company need to have a bigger market share than this?
People try to use terms like “communist” and “fascist” to pretend that authoritarianism only exists on the opposite political side of your belief, but in reality they both have their extreme groups and in a two party system the extremists don’t have anywhere to go so they just naturally vote with whatever side is closest.
I don’t think that’s ammo though, since I don’t see any democratically minded individuals on here trying that hard to push the extremist tankies out of the left anymore than I see conservatives trying to push neo-nazis out of their party. Both seem to be fine with the extremists just as long as it’s improving their total vote count.
Authoritarian is authoritarian is authoritarian. Stop using other titles to pretend your side’s authoritarians aren’t a problem.
I would love for you to explain what about that statement is not factually correct.
Authoritarianism is the problem. Full stop. “Communist” soviets and “socialist” Nazis both killed millions, oppressed millions, and ruled with an iron fist.
You can’t deny any of this without revisionist history.
“Chocolate authoritarians are better than vanilla authoritarians!” -this moron
The difference is for many nations there isn’t a strong communist party that you can actually support but there is a fascist or fascist leaning party that you can vote for.
Lol, can’t be done in a forum post but it instead requires a lot of reading as fascism is a reactionary form of ultranationalistic conservatism and does not have set beliefs other than “other is bad”.
If you need a real world example the best one currently is Viktor Orban in Hungary.
I think there’s a bit of misconstruing “let companies do what they want” with “private businesses can run their business how they want but could and should suffer the consequences of their actions”.
The main problem here is, who’s going to govern the businesses? Who’s got the teeth to throw the book at these companies like they’re so eager to do at people that break stupid, societal made up laws like “weed is baaaaad. Grrrr”
Realistically either a federal court needs to step in or some sort of legislation needs to be passed/updated regarding speech on the internet. A handful of private companies control a huge amount of public communication on the internet. Essentially the internet is the “modern town square” and if you get deplatformed from Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, your ability to communicate is massively impacted. Unless you’re already an established name by the time you get deplatformed (Like Trump or Alex Jones), being deplatformed basically makes it impossible to have a voice online.
People don’t care for now because the only people being deplatformed are “right wing extremists” but as time passes the definition for what is and isn’t acceptable on major sites will keep getting more and more strict. Even in the beginning it was a pretty grey area where these private companies were removing “misinformation” and citing government entities as the “correct” source. And shortly after the Biden administration became known to work directly with companies like Facebook to remove what they consider harmful information. At what point do we cross the line from “private companies doing what they want” to “the government directing private companies to remove information that hurts them”? For all the people who support these companies censoring topics under the direction of the Biden administration, how will you feel when the next Republican administration does it?
I unfortunately don’t see a way this ends that benefits Americans. Both parties have shown that they want to control speech/information on the internet, since 2019 it’s not only become tolerated, but actually expected. And for the first time ever a majority of Americans support the US government restricting speech online. That scares the shit out of me personally. Congress isn’t going to do shit, the FCC isn’t gonna do shit, and the supreme court certainly isn’t gonna do shit. I don’t want to imagine how the internet is gonna look in 10 years.
We should have never allowed it to get to this point. The endless mergers of tech and media companies that resulted in a handful of companies effectively controlling the internet should have caused riots in the streets. The second companies started “fact checking” posts and removing what they consider false information should have set off tons of alarm bells. And the second the US government started directing tech companies toward posts they needed to take down there should have been riots in the streets. But nobody seems to care because we’re all too busy defending powerful corporations and an authoritarian government because apparently authoritarianism isn’t bad when it only hurts your political opponents.
This argument itself got politicized and associated with the “right wing”. People in general have lost faith in the “marketplace of ideas” concept and instead are leaning towards this totalitarian approach of “let only good information exist”, forgetting that the process to get to good information requires unhindered critique of bad information. Ultimately it’s this unfounded faith that arbitrary centralized players (media, social media, government, whatever) wouldn’t adhere to, or enforce, any incorrect doctrine of truth, which is a pretty dumb concept considering the number of things society doesn’t even fully understand in the first place.
Ultimately it’s this unfounded faith that arbitrary centralized players (media, social media, government, whatever) wouldn’t adhere to, or enforce, any incorrect doctrine of truth
Everyone on earth (Especially in America) should be forced to understand this. Corporations in America are legally obligated to act in the interest of their shareholders. Ethics don’t fucking matter to them unless a law says they have to, and as we established, most of our laws regulating corporations aren’t even being enforced in the first place.
When I hear “moderates” say they want to curb big bizness.
I ask them how.
Do the courts politians and free markets work for the people? As a far leftist aka anarchist i say that they dont. I think the only real solution is revloution and getting rid of capitalism and most if not all systems of hierarchy.
How would you suggest that we prevent Microsoft from becoming an even larger entity?
Also while your at it why dont you tell us your views on abortion? That way we can know where you stand.
“Let’s burn it all down and worry about a replacement system later” is the famous last words of pretty much every country that is now led by a dictator, warlord, or authoritarian power.
I would suggest that we do what has worked for European nations and actually enforce workers rights, and establish antitrust laws to prevent monopolies where they exist now and to keep new ones from forming. Which means we will have to actually start voting in younger people into office instead of dinosaurs who are only interested in keeping their old money where it is.
So to you, other than “revolution, duh” how do you actually plan on solving the issues once you’ve destroyed the current system? You love asking others how they’ll solve it but your ideas seem to end where the rioting does.
You don’t want to solve problems, you just want to destroy shit.
This is the strike generally credited with causing mass unionization within the auto industry.
You know how they did it? A sit dow strike in a GM plant in flint michagan in 1936-1937.
Strikers threw bolts and hinges at Cops who were shooting into the building, as they tried to forcably remove strikers.
Do you support this kind of protest?
At the time Sit down strikes are not protected as freedom of assembly by the federal government. They are illegal. So is occupying a private businesses building.
In fact , it wasnt but 1 year eariler with the wagner act that striking was protected by the federal government at all.
Do you know how Americans won the right to strike?
They performed illegal strikes and mass protests for a few decades until the federal government recognized it as a right.
Soo I beleive that mass striking is the only way to bring real change to this country.
I would suggest that we do what has worked for European nations.
Most European nations have had mass protests to inorder to force governments to institute social safety nets. Ever heard of france?
Do you support mass protest? Cuz they burn shit down in france.
I’m guessing you dont!
Also you didnt answer abortion question: please answer me, what are your views on abortion?
I dont debate with poeple who dont recognize abortion as a fundamental right of pregnant people.
The way I see the far-right attempt to coopt anarchism is the same as the name of “socialism” being coopted in germany in the 30s. They recognised its growing popularity and seek to ride confusion about that while disassociating themselves with the instant rejection being openly fascist gets them.
This is a fair point. But the right co-opting anarchism does not mean anarchism isn’t far left.
Just like how nazi’s co-opting socialism doesn’t make socialism into nazism. Anarchy has ideology that directly critizes money, capitalism, the state and hierarchical systems.
If people are calling themselves anarchist and then using that ideology to promote crypto-currencies. They are the ones doing it wrong.
I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. The internet has essentially been in a wild west era since it was created, as the government has pretty much no laws or court decisions saying what information social companies can and can’t regulate. On top of that we’re in an era where the SEC happily rubber stamps every corporate merger under the sun. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that as a majority of information on the internet is controlled by a handful of companies. And on top of that, even if you want to make your “alternative” platform, that’s incredibly hard to do since services like web hosting and payment processing are also controlled by a handful of corporations.
Most major corporations have no business acquiring any other companies, and on top of that they need to be broken up. Just thinking of a few, Amazon owning Amazon shopping, AWS, Twitch, Ring, IMDb, and a fucking satellite internet company is ridiculous. The finance, energy, defense/aerospace, pharmaceutical/healthcare, and so many other industries are all guilty of this. Libertarians couldn’t be more right about one thing, competition benefits consumers, but for some reason the only thing US republicans and democrats can agree on is that we should never enforce anti-trust laws. And internet leftists, the people who you’d figure would be all for corporations being broken up, are silent on the issue. It’s infuriating to watch.
Recently I saw a lot of these with the Microsoft aquisition - on both sides. You have the Microsoft simps, but also the people who are not against Microsoft because of the scum move itself, but because they "take away" from Sony, the company they simp for.
So long as exclusives mean console+PC because I don’t care for owning another console. EA comes to mind with these mergers, maybe open up the social mind space for new blood to roll in and eat their lunch.
Whenever i see posts like these that mock political dissidents, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some underlying low self-esteem in the people who post it. If your political views are so much better than everyone else’s, can’t you just argue for that ideology instead of making a fool of other people for believing something else? This is the kind of toxic behavior that has resulted in our society being split and hateful and for that reason I had to downvote.
Agree with you but just want to share the definition of memes with you. Memes can be discussion points, ideas, formats, image templates, or any other vector for transporting an idea.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme
Image memes are just extremely easy to digest, and tend to be more enjoyable, so they’re a great method for sharing ideas.
Actually, if we’re nit-picking, it means “Personal Computer”, but the colloquial meaning has shifted somewhat since the good old IBM times to first mean desktop computers (as opposed to laptops), and then to mean non-Apple computers (including laptops), which for most people means “a computer that runs Windows.”
It would have been anything that implements Bios enough to boot MS-DOS, more or less.
But now that’s not what anyone actually wants anymore since Windows, the thing people usually boot, wants UEFI instead. So I would say now it is probably anything that can run x86 code and boot Windows, even if it’s from System76 and meant to run Linux.
I thought people made fun of them for suicide nets and incidents like workers having to sleep in factories. Or at least used to, I haven’t been keeping touch.
Yeeeeah… i have an iphone not because i like apple or something, but because their silicon is genuinely the best low wattage performance at the moment, and their software is more stable.
Both of these can change any day and I wouldn’t stick around. Brand loyalty is for chumps.
Maybe conservatives assume liberals like apple because apple greenwashes their company with their ads?
I mean, for the joke, Subaru and L.L. Bean are the obvious choices, but it’s also the kind of joke where part of the joke is that it’s also not a joke.
In 2020-2021 the line “they’re a private company and can choose what speech they host on their platform” was thrown around a lot to defend pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and loads of other social media sites.
Disney is adored by many for “standing up to DeSantis” and doing lots of inclusiveness pandering in their media. People seem to instantly forget that a corporation is literally evil the second some people get wound up over a black mermaid.
A really old meme would be the anti-capitalist who owns an iPhone and $2000 MacBook.
Lots of internet techies are excited about Microsoft acquiring Activision just because it means new video games will hit PC and Xbox quicker.
Speaking of Microsoft, while Bill Gates has become more controversial in recent years, he still has lots of people who love him for his philanthropy while nicely glossing over some of the sketchy stuff he’s done like his association with Jeffery Epstein and how he has recently become the largest landowner in the US.
I’d say the defending of corporate censorship and defending giant corporations that support certain social issues would be the two most glaring offenders.
It seems like a lot of people are talking about twitter even if mostly negative. I see it in the news and online way more often than before Elon bought it. And we are talking about it now ;)
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