A local account is created on the device and doesn’t require Internet connectivity to sign in. It’s independent of other services, and it’s not connected to the cloud. Your settings, files, and applications are limited to that single device
A Microsoft account, on the other hand, is associated to an email address and password that you use with Outlook.com, Hotmail, Office, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox, and Windows. When you sign in to your PC with a Microsoft account, you’re connected to a Microsoft cloud service, and your settings and files can sync across various devices. You can also use it to access other Microsoft services
Like many other online services they’ve saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.
They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.
Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don’t see anyone being able to do that for free for long.
Unfortunately, if anyone is going to “disrupt” youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they’ll have to monetize as well.
My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.
I agree that the sheer quantity of resources required to host videos is hard to be able to compete, but there’s also Invidious, which is the fediverse equivalent. As with other fediverse applications, it will largely depend on the people running the instances and how much they storage they can support.
We need to think about what people did before YouTube. It was already gaining traction around 2006, but before that you could still watch videos on different websites, it was just decentralized and videos were hosted on smaller pages. You might even see a website dedicated to a single video. YouTube’s incredibly convenient, but internet video can and will survive without it.
I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won’t be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.
The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.
Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.
Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I’m sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.
There’s a significant aspect of scale being ignored when you talk about video sites before Youtube took off.
Not a single one of those self hosted sites had anywhere near the storage that youtube allows. Want a video from over a year or two ago? Hope you downloaded it or the creator loved it enough to leave it up. Frame rates? Resolution? What are those? I understand that tech has advanced as well, and those issues would not be as severe now, but I really doubt that a lot of channels even now would be able to keep the same lengthy back catalog of old content if they were self hosting.
I also think that there are countless channels that would never have existed if the creators had to figure out hosting their own site, setting up streaming of the video files on it, potentially managing their own comments plugins, potentially managing their own methods to keep viewers aware when new content was posted, and having to somehow spread the word of their existence without the aid of an existing platform trying to keep people viewing things for more ad impressions.
The monopoly of Youtube is a problem, the lack of easy to use and configure open alternatives is a problem… but we can’t ignore the massive impact Youtube had in lowering the barrier to entry and upkeep costs of being a content maker.
There are a lot of hurdles to content creation and hosting that Youtube enables creators to completely ignore.
Also, lots of the younger generations didn’t really mind the ads. After this news showed up, we had a discussion going on my company discord. Most of the older people started sharing workarounds but most of the younger people said that they’ve been using YouTube with ads and didn’t see any problem with it.
I’ve seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.
I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn’t stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don’t own a TV and turn it off.
I’ve been using YouTube Premium (née YouTube Red) for so long that I totally forgot that there are ads on YouTube and was surprised by all of this news popping off.
Controversial take around these parts but… I don’t mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.
I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I’ll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:
If I’m paying, you don’t get to also show me ads. I won’t even pay for HBO for this reason. They’re showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it’s still obnoxious to me
The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.
It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there’s a million of them and I don’t plan to use one as a central portal for news. I’d rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I’d kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
I find the number of people saying “well I’m not going to use YouTube anymore!” hilarious. Yeah dude, that’s the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I’ll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don’t think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.
Maybe I guess? People keep talking about Google selling user data but that is one thing they explicitly DON’T do. User data is their competitive advantage, not their product. They sell advertising, and advertisers can be explicit in who they target. If Google sells the data, they lose the value they hold to advertisers.
So Google is almost certainly still recording what I do and what I watch. But if I’m not seeing ads related to it, am I paying twice? What makes it different from, for example, Netflix keeping track of my watch history to recommend other shows?
I suppose that the videos I watch might inform the ads I see on search, so in that sense you could say I pay twice. But I don’t use Google for search anyway so it kind of doesn’t matter.
I’d kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.
This is exactly the reason I use Apple News+. I get access to multiple magazines I have read forever, actual well written journalism, news briefs tailored to my wants, etc. It’s very much worth the price for me.
Same here except I’ve always used adblocker. The contrast between YouTube with adblock + sponsorblock compared to stock, cannot be overstated. The site literally becomes unuseable. It’s awful.
Next week: Over 30 million users pull the plug on Chrome, leaving Google execs to make the surprised Pikachu face and wonder aloud why millennials hate web browsers.
Yeah, it takes some mental effort to change your habits, people are more likely to just install a new extension.
BUT, those extensions are probably next, dropping uBlock is part of a long-standing war by Google against ad blocking of all kinds. So at some point Chrome users won’t be able to escape ads, and then i do wonder if they’ll switch.
I feel like normal people who are too lazy to care would probably just use the default browser that came with their device. It will be Chrome if it’s an Android, but it will be everything but Chrome if it’s any other OS, it will be Edge or Safari.
Now i haven’t installed Chrome in a minute, but how many devices is it the default for? My understanding is that a lot of Chrome users specifically looked for it and installed it to use instead of the default, especially Windows users. And for that public, i do think it matters, i do think they would consider switching.
Outside of the “Microsoft bad” comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.
The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It’s made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it’s destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it’s adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.
And the annoying thing is, this tech can be exceptionally useful when it’s actually been implemented thoughtfully.
Effortlessly cleaning up audio recordings using AI tooling is incredible, for example. There are audio recordings that I’ve been able to make sound great that previously would’ve required me to make some calls and ask for a bunch of re-recordings and added days of delays to a project.
AI in image recognition to vastly speed up medical imaging diagnosis, or analysing lab work? Amazing. Asking unpaid medical students to laboriously pore over thousands of images sounds like a nightmare.
Better offline translation? Sign me the fuck up.
Image description for the visually impaired, like my sister? Genuinely life changing. A lot of content online isn’t properly tagged, or has zero attention placed on accessibility.
The list goes on. Unfortunately, with big tech being as they are, their first thoughts turn to “which implementations of AI will aid us the most in scraping userdata and showing ads?”
The list goes on. Unfortunately, with big tech being as they are, their first thoughts turn to “which implementations of AI will aid us the most in scraping userdata and showing ads?”
Don’t forget making sure the peons can squeeze out more productivity for the 1%.
There have been several instances where people have released ebooks that are fully AI generated, and are basically scams with no real content or information.
Exactly. Running fedora desktop and I am thinking why the move does.not do more poeple. The only Microsoft junk I am using is the corporation laptop and that I am sure wont get this function.
Even better as a Windows 10 user - get to avoid the issues with version 11
I responded with the end of life date for Windows 10 to let you know that those are depending on staying on Windows 10 can only do so for a limited amount of time, and hence only have a limited time of avoiding issues with Windows 10. That’s the relevance.
Windows has always been free for me so it’s no big issue. But yes, as a current Windows 10 user my point still stands that the best of both worlds is using it IMO. Have the widest support for games and can easily remove any bloatware you want from it already.
You are the one who originally changed the goal posts about it being changed in 2 years time and that being an issue. I’ll worry about that in 2 years time - for all we know Microsoft will extend the support.
But also to your point, Linux is very young itself so you can’t expect it to always be around. Once it’s around for 100+ years sure, but I just don’t see that being a thing. There’ll come a time where it’s no longer relevant.
I’ll worry about that in 2 years time - for all we know Microsoft will extend the support.
That link, which it seems you haven’t read, is from Microsoft directly, stating their EoL date, so no, that won’t change.
But also to your point, Linux is very young itself so you can’t expect it to always be around. Once it’s around for 100+ years sure, but I just don’t see that being a thing. There’ll come a time where it’s no longer relevant.
You truly don’t know what you speak of (the italicized part). It’s 32 years old.
You are the one who originally changed the goal posts about it being changed in 2 years time and that being an issue.
That’s not changing the goalpost.
You said you have Windows 10, so you can avoid Windowd 11 and it’s issues that it has that we have all been discussing in this thread.
All I did was respond with that you won’t have Windows 10 forever, so you won’t be able to avoid Windows 11, which you acknowledged…
Yes, I’m glad companies never change their minds about their policies. When they set a date they always keep to it and have never gone back to it due to consumer demand. Oh except they do that a fair bit. Guess we’ll just have to see what Microsoft actually does when it comes time.
32 years is indeed young lol. Maybe you are young yourself so it seems older? There are companies that are hundreds of years old that have gone bankrupt in the last few decades, why would Linux be any different? Again, it may work for now but who knows in the future. But 32 years is nothing. There are older Unix-based systems like Itron and QNX still around and commonly used, but not sure they’ll last.
And to your last point, I can just keep Windows 10 past 2025… It’s not like lack of support forces me up. Do you not realize how many people still use unsupported versions? Check out the XP life cycle: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecy…
95% of ATM’s were still using it for example 5 years after mainstream support ended.
So I wasn’t going to bother replying, thinking you were either just trolling, or a bot, but my curiosity got the best of me, so I am replying with just one question…
32 years is indeed young lol.
There are companies that are hundreds of years old that have gone bankrupt in the last few decades, why would Linux be any different?
Are you actually aware of the genesis, history, and current status of the ownership of Linux?
I know a few Moroccan people living in Europe. They’re doing alright. If you’re a decent person and are willing to learn about the culture that hosts you (without losing your roots, of course), you should do fine.
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