I mean, it’s unavoidable. Everyone draws their own line in the sand based on what they think is “right” and “wrong”, using whatever best tools and ideas are available to them, picked from the avalanche of options.
The line will not stay put from generation to generation, that’s not a reasonable thing to ask for. If we go back 50 years when tv was king, it’s not like all the tv shows were equally good, or stayed good.
So, it’s kinda just on us to seek out and pick the right things to support, and be prepared in case those change too. It’s kinda the whole reason I’m personally here on the Fediverse. I mean, back in the stone age our ancestors had to do the same things, its not like their environments always just stayed perfect. If something changes and you don’t want to starve to death, you gotta just do something. Can’t just wish it away.
Honestly, I just use the internet less. I’m never going to pay. I can’t be bothered with the loopholes anymore. If it bugs me to pay or subscribe, I leave. I’m fine with them not wanting me as a user, and I hope they’re fine with me not wanting them as a supplier. They don’t have anything that I actually need that badly.
Oddly enough I probably use the internet more than ever. It’s just not that internet.
Weirdly, the only parts of the Internet that I’m really liking these days are Hacker News, Lemmy and the one part that I do pay for, which is Kagi Ultimate. It is very refreshing not to be the product and I do occasionally need to use a search engine for something.
I’m so done with “browsing” YouTube. I also hardly ever click the links anymore when people post them here, and that is because of the ads.
There are some good channels that I occasionally checkout whenever I’m really bored, and I absolutely don’t mind them getting the ad revenue like any other free tv show, but it’s nothing that I can’t do without.
In my opinion, good YT channels who make quality content ought to apply for other mean of distribution that doesn’t scare away viewers. Let’s say that f.i. Numberphile, Veritasium or Primitive Technology were on Netflix or even Disney+, I’d prefer to watch it there. That’s how bad YouTube is.
If YouTube managed to get part of the all-in deals that I have on the other “real” streaming services, then they’d get some fraction of whatever my cellphone carrier pays to those. Right now I just don’t want to bother with it.
If youtube was a reasonable price I’d pay it. But being google, they not only charge a ridiculous price, but even if you pay that, they’ll STILL sell your data on top.
Furthermore, it being a public company no profit will ever be enough. It doesn’t matter if I paid 30$ a month, the next quarter the 30 billion profit won’t be enough because it didn’t grow from the previous quarter…
And if you buy any hardware from Google, count on it being discontinued and unsupported within a year. Anyone who continues to buy shit from Google is either deluded or a fool, or both.
I got a Pixel 5a refurbished because it’s supported by LineageOS. Like a week after buying it I dropped it, cracking the screen. Got on iFixit, ordered a replacement screen, and once it got here spent an evening installing it. No regrets. But I am a fool, so that tracks.
My next phone will be a Fairphone now that they work with US carriers, though.
Thing is, most people don’t want to pay for services that to them seemed to be free since forever. And this creates collective social pressure to follow suit. Nothing a big company offers is ever free. You’re just paying in alternate currency.
It’s gross though. Say you started to pay, they would still force ads into their product because they’re greedy and demanding more money. We’re seeing this with streaming sites now.
The funny thing is with youtube, for example, I am a premium user. I deactivated all tracking of my habits on there. Now I am greeted, as a homepage, with nothing else than a call to action to reactivate said tracking. As a paying customer I see less (as in none at all) content on the homepage than an anonymous user would. I am subbed to 170+ channels. Yet they tell me they cannot come up with suggestions unless they can track my every step on their platform. sus. And when saying funny I mean extremely aggravating.
No.1 Apparently not present on uBlock Origin, which makes it not a problem for me (though it’s shite that they are doing it anyway). I don’t use YouTube that often anyways.
No.2 You are not loosing a lot - it’s most likely some crappy video about a guy slipping on a banana peel or some shit like this - 99.9% you are not missing on much :D
See as much as I dislike the company, I can see how it would make sense from a business and logic point of view. They are paying for the servers and, to some extent and form, for the content, and by using any ad blocking content you sabotage their earnings from this platform. I’m surprised they are not blocking browsers with said plugins, but that would cause a major uproar. But then again, not much competition around…
fr, i didn’t use for the longest time because a 5 seconds ad before every video and some on the side never bothered me much, it was when it started being 2 UNSKIPABBLE ADS BEFORE EVERY VIDEO, PLUS MID ROLL ADS that I couldn’t deal with it anymore
Sure, the money has to come from somewhere, but, no ad server has ever managed to fully eradicate malware from the ads they serve and some sites have so much of the page covered in ads that the site simply isn’t navigable without an ad blocker. The first is on the ad server companies, but the second one is just stupid. I will simply never trust ad servers anymore after having seen computers destroyed by ad-delivered malware, including one of my own. Even if the websites themselves go back to a more restrained and reasonable number of ads, I will never turn my ad blocker off for simple safety reasons.
I read only one subreddit still and it is Am I The Asshole, it is very easy to spot the ads because only one add matches the format of the posts. Anything that doesn’t start with AITA is an ad.
That gives me way more time to read books that I have been putting off. Starting with a few books by Cory Doctorow who coined that term enshittification.
It is a lot easier to make time for reading when watching a video will mean an ad before, during, and after every 5 minute clip. I subscribe to a few news shows so I can listen to them as podcasts while I work to support without having ads.
Maybe this is why I’ve been so ready to fully embrace Lemmy for my internetting. It’s the opposite of enshittified, as FOSS often is.
I’ll admit though, I pay for YouTube and get more bang for the buck than any other money I spend on entertainment. I’ve had it for a while though, and did not sign up because of their renewed war on ad blocking. Plus it’s nice that the creators get paid from my view, even though it’s not much.
I pay for YouTube as well, it’s worth it bc of YouTube music which I like better than Spotify, I just need podcasts to get on board and we will be good to go. I will add YouTube is the only media I pay for (other than peacock for 1 month a year to watch tour de France)
I’ve not had good luck with Firefox on mobile, I use duckduckgo. I’m not forcing anyone to do what I do. YouTube is my main source of media for the most part. I use it on my smarts TV’s in my house - and I haven’t set up computers on all TV’s yet… So it is what it is and it works for me.
Edit: down voting my personal opinion and what I choose to spend my money on for my own convenience isn’t going to change my mind… Just saying
That’s one of the big values for me, the effortless smart device support. Sure I know tech shit and I block ads in every browser I use, but it’s nice when members of my family can just use the YouTube app, full featured, on whatever TV/phone/tablet they have access to at the moment. It’s not a matter of whether I can watch YouTube for free without seeing ads, it’s a question of whether the convenience and creator support are worth the cost of a drive thru meal per month. Add in YouTube music and I don’t even think about it any more.
It’s an ease of use thing, kind of like how Steam ended PC game piracy for many people.
Oh I think I know what you mean. DDG + Firefox has some weird behavior on YouTube. I can watch the videos but if I wanna properly load the page it gives me a request failure.
It’s kind of frustrating on mobile. Have you tried loading through a different search engine? It’s not a big issue for me but it’s something I experience too as I’m a DDG user
Direct revenue is logically a better model for creators, but I don’t like that the share of youtube premium revenue is determined by a black box. If it’s distributed according to my total monthly watch time, how can anyone say for sure whether the direct revenue split for a given channel >= potential advertising revenue had I watched without premium or adblock? I don’t think even creators could tell you based on the analytics available to them via Youtube.
I canceled and set up memberships on a few channels instead. That way I actually get something out of it (member perks), and I know that at least my favourite creators get 70% of those amounts. Also, sponsorblock
As far as I know the OED is a very specific dictionary that’s way beyond what most people need and mostly for people dealing with language in their work. www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com would be the more personal variant from what I’ve heard.
It’s sensible that maintaining a current up to date dictionary is worthy of compensation, but I think the tragedy is that such endeavors as “maintaining current information on human language” aren’t just publicly funded, so here they are panhandling for “Dictionary plus” lol.
The OED has been like this for at least 15 years (possibly longer but that’s when I first encountered it). So I wouldn’t consider this an appropriate example of the enshittification that’s been taking place of late.
The OED goes very in-depth into etymology in the way other English dictionaries do not. It’s the size of an encyclopedia. This is the print version of the second edition, which has been supplemented several times since:
Man, what are you talking about? YouTube has always been slow. It got even worse when they forced everyone to use dash playback, and that was over a decade ago.
Listen here my dude my brain is still stuck to the time when YouTube allowed you to make a fancy fully customized channel page which was later culled go make way for the bland mobile friendly interface ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
And whenever you want to search for information about something the result page gets flooded with AI generated garbage pages with misleading titles and that provide bullshit information.
Top result Top ten results are always things like:
"You are right to question these days indeed, ‘why is the Internet enshittified and Ai is stupid’? Certainly, the world would like to know and you are not alone in wondering why is the internet enshittifed and Ai is stupid.
Today we will be looking at 17 ways the enshittified why is Ai stupid and internet.
I definitely think there’s room to invent some other social websites like Lemmy; things that can A) Monetize themselves in some way other than ads, B) Formulate the way users use them so that they’re resistant to bots, C) Promote well-thought discussion points instead of just regurgitation.
I’m seriously considering something like say, a site that requires users to record a short webcam video introducing themselves before they can post. Obviously, that wouldn’t be a good venue for anyone very privacy-focused, but perhaps you get the idea.
Monetizing through ads isn’t the problem: The problem is that the companies keep getting greedier and seeing the new ways they can exploit the userbase.
Greed isn’t the problem, per se – it’s that outside of the biggest sites, which could hoover up ad targeting data of hundreds of millions to billions and sell that data through their own internal ad platform – the model was never viable to begin with. Notice that the enshittification really took off all soon as interest rates jumped? Tech startups have all been floating along on easy money, but now that loans aren’t basically free, VC dollars are drying up. Companies that could previously offset their capital burn with yet another round of investment now suddenly need to make money on their own merit, and are finding that they have to cut service to the bone and monetize the bejeezus out of what’s left if they have any chance of survival.
Remember when ads were just those animated gif boxes on either side of the content you actually consumed? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Then they became annoying popups, to the point that EVERY browser ships with popups blocked by default. Now it’s all javascript occupying your screen everywhere. Plus all those invasive “Notifications”
I miss forums. Not that they disappeared completely but that used to be the go-to for good info. Still is maybe, cause I’ve read through a lot of garbage trying to learn about something pretty simple and then hit a forum post that’s like “well it depends if it’s early- or late-season blight”. What? The twenty garden blog posts I studied never mention such a distinction. But there’s Jimmy in Mt Carmel Indiana breaking it down.
One thing that’s actually better for all that’s worse is the Discord means one login for everything. Back then you had to register to every forum even if you only needed one file and never came back again.
And this is exactly why we won’t actually get any new special projects, because anything which can’t be easily monetized will be treated as competition and ruined deliberately, and anything which can be easily monetized will be purchased and worn like a skin suit by greedy corpos the way the current Internet is being used.
I’ve come to the same terms.
other day I decided to open reddit.com and noticed that almost every other (re)post was from a bot. even the top comments were from bots.
since then I’ve added reddit to my growing blocklist.
I now spend more time on feeder, an RSS reader app.
I haven’t been to reddit much since the api fiasco. If it’s not too much trouble can you point me to some obvious bots so i can get a feel for what that looks like?
I’ve heard something to the effect that approximately 80% of all internet traffic passes through Facebook and Google. Unfortunately I can’t find anything to substantiate that claim but it’s sounds plausible.
I remember the early internet. It was a wild place but at least it was fair and balanced. Now every click on every page is designed to serve the for profit attention economy. Kinda sucks in comparison.
What I don’t get is how most places, people get mad at us for not being able to read an article due to the paywall. I mean, I’m not going to subscribe to 50 shitty news sites just so I can read someone’s damn random shit.
This is my biggest gripe with lemmy. A MASSIVE amount of links I try to follow is just paywalls or so damn bloated with garbage it isn’t worth the effort
Add comment