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What the actual heck is happening to the internet. It feels like it is being destroyed at a breakneck pace.
"The 2030's are going to be a reckoning for how much of the 21st century was built on the back of low interest rates." See Adam Conover's interview with Dan Olson of Folding Ideas.
I was just thinking the exact same thing. Things seems to have accelerated lately, but I don't know if this is something regular users even notice or care about and it just feels significant to us because of the recent twitter and reddit idiocy.
I am super excited about all the attention the fediverse is getting. There are still a ton issues to be solved here, but decentralization feels like the next evolutionary step of the web.
One of the issues is "who's gonna pay for it"? And I think the answer is something like "most users are", in the sense that you'd pay your local instance, the same way you used to pay for newsgroups. Thus keeping it out of the hands of venture capitalists, hedge funds and billionaires in general, because hopefully we've learned that that's a bad thing.
Big tech was basically a big dumping scheme, built on top of cheap money (i.e. low interest rates). This prevented smaller competitors from challenging oligarchs, but now the interest rates are too high for this to be sustainable, so they are scrambling to make their businesses actually profitable without admitting the entire business model was unethical and, well... just plain stupid in the long term.
The corporatization of the world feels like it's coming to a head. You're not allowed to own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription and it's impossible to afford property. You just rent everything putting you on constant edge until you die.
also, you now are required to log in to view twitter. I don't care that much, but sometimes people would link to tweets and now I won't be able to view them when they do.
I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.
The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.
How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it's impossible to replicate that type of "success" overnight.
This is the fallout from the technology industry shrinking and coming to terms with itself. See the crash of the Silicon Bank recently as an example. Basically as the positive outlook toward these kind of businesses and pursuits continues to mellow out we'll see these companies look inward to squeeze as much money out of their products as possible.
Musk started it with the extreme monetizing of Twitter. Cutting off api access, charging premium subs for reach, selling verified… and he got away with it. All the brainless Twitter users are still there using his platform and bitching instead of leaving.
Musk proved you can piss all over your userbase and they won’t leave. Now all tech companies are doing it. Meta is charging for verification. YouTube cutting adblock. Google looking to stop supporting adblock in chrome. Even Reddit CEO citing Musk as his inspiration going forward.
LEAVE these platforms, people. The CEOs are literally laughing at your stupidity while cashing checks.
Isn't this just what many people predicted what would happen when everybody would use adblock? Now most people use some kind of blocker and some browsers even ship with a content blocker. Now pages need to make money in another way, so that's either subscriptions, donations. or just force people to watch the ads anyway. I doubt people would want to donate any money to YouTube so then you get this.
It is not nice for users, but without income they would have to shut the site down. The same will happen when Lemmy gets popular, people will really have to donate to instance owners or they will also be forced to get money in another way.
This feels incredibly charitable towards multibillion dollar corporations that are in a race to the bottom for pandemic level revenues by making these changes, but I'm no expert.
Oh, you mean the multibillion dollar corporations? The ones that get more per minute than many business will get in their whole existence, not to mention any of us people? No, adblocking is a drop in the ocean for them, that has always been bullshit, same with piracy. What we're seeing is the result of economical effects outside of all this, namely changes in interest rates, all the VCs and shareholders are now demanding the return of their investments at any cost. That's why ALL of them are squeezing at the same time.
And about Lemmy instances? Absolutely! We cannot depend on the generosity of admins forever, and i'm OK with this.
Turns out that storing and delivering petabytes of data isn't free.
We never assumed it was, where do you think these billionaires got their money?
Cool, can we start charging them back for all the data they sell about us?
And so the global enshittification grows...
if youtube could win against adblockers, they wouldn't need to get manifest v3 to destroy their functions. firefox users stay winning
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Begun the ad wars have
What kinda bugs me about youtube premium is that even if you pay you still get ads via baked in sponsors. I know creators have the right to do what they want with there content but I wish as a user there is an economical opiton to truely block ads.
Currently there are two paid models:
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Nebula like services. I kinda wish more platforms like this would popup since atleast when you use them you truely get no ads (no baked in nor platform injected). While they have a lot of creators a lot of creators are missing from the platform (its mostly education/tech focused).
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Patreon/Floatplane. Now this is typically the more popular option with creators as it guarantees a reasonably stable cash flow. The problem is as a user if you have to subscribe to multiple patreons for adfree content it can easly get to the cost of a cable bill (assume each creator charges $10 per month if you have 10-20 creators your follow you could be looking at a minimum of $100-$200 a month just to enjoy adfree content).
A kinda caviot is idk how much it costs in time/labor for production of youtube videos for major channels like linus. It could be that services like Nebula/Vessle would never be able to cover production cost hence why a patreon model is used. Even youtube ads if I recall only was able to cover about only one of their employees saleries (a lot but not enough to sustain the company).
I hope this post didn't come of as selfish/greedy.
SponsorBlock does a good job skipping the sponsored ads that the uploaders put in their videos.
I will never pay the richest company in the world to watch YouTube. Then I just don't watch and instead contribute to something new that is distributed and federated.
Is there a good federated alternative to YouTube?
Hopefully there will be, although it's going to be a challenge
It’s a lot harder to federate a YouTube competitor because storing all that video costs a lot more than text and links.
I wish they’d just insert the adverts into the videos so we could fast forward them if we wish. Why do we have to be locked into watching the same handful of adverts over and over.
They used to let us skip after 2 seconds and then it went from one advert to two. Now it’s two unskippable adverts. No wonder people want to block them.
Imagine thousands of instances, paid for by individuals. It's not expensive to rent a server with maybe 50 GB of space for less than 10 dollars.
So 50 GB times 1000 = 50 TB of data. Of course not YouTube level but that's just 1000 people too.
What if 100.000 people paid that much?
I think federated is the future.
Lol do it, shoot your own foot I guess.
Fuck em. I'll use nebula.
ah, ok, i will simply not watch youtube videos.
Totally. YouTube is barely scraping by these days. Them and all of Google. They’re riding the bus to work. They had to stop eating out. Poor almost richest company in the world. They NEED us to turn off as lockers or else they’ll have to shut the whole thing down
If this is true, it seems like a condolence of what YouTube is doing here. If hosting all those videos costs more than they receive, eventually YouTube will end.
I always imagined that YouTube was quite profitable?
I guess this will be an unpopular opinion, but YouTube is justified in doing this imo. Video hosting isn’t cheap, especially providing 4K & 8K. They’ve gotta be able to support costs somehow, and if you’re not paying for Premium, you should be paying with ads. You’re also preventing the content creators from being compensated for content that you find valuable, useful, and/or entertaining.
I know ads are annoying, and I hate them just as much as you do. But a big reason why we have people who make super niche videos that help you learn how to fix something on your car or those regular videos that you watch every week is because the creators are able to get compensated for their work. Are you really saying that utility and entertainment isn’t worth 30 seconds of ads and it’s better to not support them at all?
Part of the reason we’re in this enshittification era of social media is because of the expectation of social media to be free. We need to learn from our past mistakes. It’s not sustainable.
There are plenty of viewers who don't want/need/care about the resolution. Especially not 8K, probably not even 4K. People who watch on their phone, probably won't even notice if the content doesn't go above 720p.
Anyway, if YT wishes to charge for their service, they should try having more reasonable fees, and making sure fees actually remove all ads from the service, and actually reward creators fairly - they get much less than they should as a proportion of fees paid.
As it stands, it is much better to subscribe to the likes of Nebula or to individual creators through Patreon (if they host their videos there). The bill might end up adding up to something similar or even more than YouTube Premium, but at least you get what you paid for and the money goes to the creators, not to line Google's executive's pockets, which in the end means better content, better platforms and a better viewing experience.
Yeah, I kind of agree on this. The real question is: is YouTube currently profitable, and they're trying to squeeze even more out of users?
It would be nice if companies could look at a tidy profit and just say "that's enough" and leave it be. Alas, that's not how capitalism operates…
I pay for YouTube premium, and use a YouTube blocker. I’ve been seeing weird issues. It’s pissing me off. I feel like this is nearly lawsuit territory if they don’t resolve it.
I have Premium plus I use uBlock and have never had a problem.
Haven’t tried this yet, but it’s on my list of things to do…use your hosts file to dump the ad sites to 0.0.0.0. Compliments of Steven Black
Hosting 4k video coasts a lot of money. I don't understand people that think Google need to subsidies it. It need to make money.
They let you pay a very reasonable monthly fee for unlimited music and video stream.
They let me pay? What? You got it the wrong way, I pay for things I consider worth my money. That's the only thing that happens, nobody is letting me pay. What a strange way of thinking
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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