THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.
- the best advice an AI ever gave (too bad it was a fictional AI)
That's because all the good shit* comes from humans.
*but also so much bad shit. So so so much bad as well.
Except when it comes to voting. Vote, please.
Fuckin’ A on this one. Think about how much companies make with entirely artificial scarcity. You can only add 1 license to this, you can only watch on one TV unless you pay us $15 a month. It costs $200 to change where you are in the database table for this flight. Complete bullshit and we need to see it for what it is and stop it. I love how she says all that will be left in their wake is dull capitalists. Exactly. Stop playing their games. Play your game.
Line must go 🆙
Wasn't so long ago that someone would get laughed out of a room for taking the internet this seriously. People never planned for the inevitability of the internet being central to modern life, and, years later, here we are.
So, to whomever needs to hear it: Maybe start taking things like what this person is saying a little more seriously going forward.
Seriously man. The religious wars on YouTube. Cause they calmly debate their point of view right? WRONG. And it's the same BS with politics. People are just so angry. And then there's trolls who make things even worse. Like seriously man these mfs need Jesus.
So anyways, that's why I insist that any cryptocurrency I use is 100% FOSS and 100% p2p. The future of the world's money supply doesn't belong in the hands of any foundation.
NewPipe is great on my phone, SmartTube for my TV. I tried showing others but it's like they don't think that there is a problem. I use Arch btw.
100%.
SponsorBlock on SmartTube is incredible. Saved so much time
YouTube.com through firefox with uBo for me. SmartTube is super easy to set up and if anyone is on the fence, do it now.
i just use the YouTube site on firefox with adblock and sponsorblock. slightly janky but works
Does anyone know something not terribly complicated for blocking YouTube ads on Xbox one? We don't have a smart tv and the ads are infuriating when I remember they exist
Stop using Discord if you care for the internet. Seriously, Discord is the internet but privatized. It’s the precursor of the future of the internet that capitalists want. Access only available if you login. Search is useless for anything older than a week. Data not accessible to search engines, even on public servers. Need to use their bloated (web)app. Charges for basic functions. Stop 👏 using👏 Discord👏 What is wrong with good old forums.
And Twitter is going the same direction as Discord.
Personally I'm ok with discord for private social communication, imo not everything needs to be archived or searchable. But there's people/devs who use discord as a knowledge repository and that's the recipe for disaster imo.
The recipe: Old problem questions, solutions, how to guides, ... All hidden behind a login wall and if you do get in, then you still have to contend with the crappy search engine, so you might just as well ask the probably already answered question yet again. And one day it's probably all going poof or behind some kind of paywall. Basically also what quora has been trying to do for years, but I don't think any people with more than a few braincells complain about quora being hard to access, since most of their content stinks anyhow.
yeah this is mostly my gripe with discord. Many groups, especially game dev groups, use it to share knowledge with the public, yet that knowledge quickly becomes buried and virtually inaccessible.
I don't like discord, but it is a MASSIVE improvement over all the meta-garbage. Stop using Facebook, instagram, whatsapp and really also twitter first. Discord is the smaller evil compared to those.
Yes forums have their application and are better than discord for a lot of things, but discord is really more a competitor to IRC-chats with a focus on life discussion, rather than long-living content. And it isn’t discords fault if some people completely misuse it as something that it really isn’t trying to be.
Need to use their bloated (web)app.
Which means that it works in a regular browser, which is so much better than a lot of other infrastructure that is increasingly mobile-app only.
Charges for basic functions.
Does it though? It charges for certain emojis and the like, but that is honestly a MUCH more healthy business model than what a lot of other places on the internet are doing. And if you just want to use it as intended, you really aren’t missing out on anything.
I’m really not saying that it is great, but I wonder whether some of the people ranting about this may get signal boosted by meta to distract from their even worse cesspool…
eh, discord started catering to people using it as a forum, so they are actively making the problem worse...
they introduced pseudo-forum channels where messages are grouped into threads, like a traditional forum...of course not indexed, and with their signature terrible "last message first" sorting, and terrible UI that doesn't do any of the things a forum is supposed to be good at...
so yeah, discord absolutely belongs to the other awful internet diseases you mentioned, it's not an exception...
I get that it's stealing your data, what I don't get is why it has to be accessible by search engines. First of all, most servers are private because they would rather be that way, they don't want anyone joining or viewing the content. Second of all, the big search engines would have had the ability to gather all the available data and train AIs, give it to advertisers etc. I don't want that. I don't know what the Chinese are doing with the data, but I know what Google and Bing would be doing with it. Not everything on the internet has to be available to everyone, a lot of people want privacy. I get that ideally there shouldn't be accounts with personal information required, but the rest I don't agree with. Reddit and twitter are meant to be public, everyone on such social media is aware that anyone can see their comments and posts. But discord serves another purpose, it's for private, closed communities.
I also don't see what basic feature is charged. Everything charged has to do with functions that require a lot of storage/server space or stupid stickers and emojis. None of that is a basic feature and for the former I get why someone would charge.
I am not defending discord, I'd rather not use it, I know it aggressively steals our data and they probably plan on enshittifying it a lot more once they've taken out the competition completely, but that criticism I mentioned is not valid imo.
you shouldn't use it because it's a black hole for information.
anything out on discord should be treated as deleted, because it inevitably will disappear one day, with no hope of recovery.
when a public forum is indexable that means that projects like archive.org and wayback machine can save the contents, even if the site itself disappears some day, meaning the information is preserved for future generations.
communities use discord way more than they should, and all that those communities create is effectively non-existent. most of it is already as good as gone.
think of modding communities, which are by far the worst offenders when it comes to discord: not only are way too many mods hosted on discord itself, way too many communities are only sort-of indexed through discord, meaning the links to where the actual files are hosted can only be accessed through discord. so even if the files survive the inevitable purge, they are lost anyways.
so many communities have already just... disappeared without warning, because the server got nuked for one reason or another, often completely idiotic reasons. and all the knowledge stored on those is gone. forever.
that's why discord is insanely bad for the internet as a whole, but for data driven communities especially.
it would be fine if people only used it for what it was meant to do, chatting, but misusing it as a forum is where the problems begin.
it gets even worse when people insist on using it as a support channel: questions and answers are constantly buried and impossible to find, search engines can't show you the contents, so you don't even know that your problems even have answers, questions are constantly repeated over and over, even though they've already been answered, and on and on the list goes.
discord is bad for communities. it is destructive. it is insanely divisive!
there's a trend for every single creator/author to have their own server!
so instead of having one big community, where users can easily find information and content, and creators can easily exchange ideas and concepts, you get tiny splinters that either don't talk to each other, or don't even realize they exist at all!
and all of that is completely hidden behind opaque "search" and "discover" algorithms that only serve what discord itself thinks the user wants.
it's top to bottom terrible for communities, but people flock to it anyways, for all the wrong reasons.
discord is the bane of online social groups!
and the worst part is: you are absolutely FORCED to use it, because damn near everyone uses it! and there's no alternative way to access it, you HAVE to use it! that alone should set off alarm bells!
I would dump discord the second I can get somewhere I can do voice coms and stream my screen with my friends. That is the only thing I use it for anyway.
"Why are you still using it?" Buddy I don't want either but it's the old story of "most people are using it", plus it's one of my ways to cope with loneless.
I agree with everything you said except search. I've found search to be pretty good. Yesterday I found my comment from 3 years ago on a server.
I suspect Discord will die within months, till then I'll keep using it..
Yes I understand the irony of that statement.
Search is useless for anything older than a week.
I mean, search isn't a fantastic feature, but it does work. So this sounds like a you problem, not a Discord problem.
It's crazy how little the younger generation knows about torrenting. With my younger brothwr and his friend we couldn't find a movie in any of the streaming services and I told them I would download it in less than 5 minutes, they didn't understand how that was possible but were impressed when I did it. We need to keep the art alive
Hilariously, if the corporations could have curtailed their greed for a few more years - piracy could have sufficiently reduced in popularity and need to the point that it would have largely become a ‘lost art’.
Alas, chasing ever higher returns because “line must go up” is just introducing a new generation to these old tried and true methods.
Not generational, that's niche stuff. The basic issue is exactly the same from 30 years ago.
Probably right, I just felt like there were more people that were at least aware of it
If you can't pirate it, it's not worth the money to rent it
I only disagree when it comes to paying creators for their content. I pay for a single streaming service, and that's just because it directly supports the people running the service and making the content.
I'm more than happy to pay creators more or less directly for content, but I'm definitely not supporting shit services like Hulu and Netflix.
I pay for a single streaming service, and that’s just because it directly supports the people running the service and making the content.
Nebula?
Dropout.tv would be my guess
Slippi was right, I pay for dropout.tv. It's an amazing platform that basically rose from the ashes of college humor. If you like their style of humor, they have a bunch of new shows and tons of D&D-like content. Easiest $5/mo I spend.
Dropout for me
I say this as a creator; it is not stealing to take something that can be replicated infinitely without cost.
It can be reproduced indefinitely without cost to the creator. It's the first production that's a bitch.
How is initial production funded if nobody is willing to pay for it?
If it were fairly funded it would be easier to find the money. Because right now tickets and subscriptions are most expensive ever yet just a few months ago US writers had to go on a long strike. If execs and "stars" stopped taking astronomical amounts of money then the production costs would probably go down.
Up front through things like kickstarter? instead of convincing a publisher to sign you on you have to convince a crowd
Artists will create art regardless of whether they are paid for it.
In any case, sale of physical media and merchandising will earn plenty to fund production.
I wonder if there is a word for that
this post is 100% right, anyway stop buying phones, you don't need them.
I wish to go even further.
I'm okay with paying for Internet services if the price is right... I'm not okay with also getting milked (data mined) for profit in addition to paying.
Remember when the internet was prviate, anonymous, cool, and had more than three websites?
Egads, I long for those days.
Also work on not being such a dopamine hound. I don't need to see new-show this year. Or this decade. I'll see it eventually. Or never. Who cares.
Know what's as good as music? The wind in the trees.
Not saying I'm some ascetic who doesn't enjoy media, but when I hit a paywall or an adwall I just try to say "ok, see ya later" and move on letting that content desire slip from my mind.
This is great advice. There's so much content to enjoy from the past 20+ years that I don't feel the desire to immediately buy the new thing. You can usually get it for far cheaper down the line.
There are communities such as PatientGamers for videogames that preach exactly this.
Usually, but not always. Some 5-10 year old games are still north of $50. The price for some movies and TV series has gone up rather than down over the years.
Luckily, as you said there's so much out there that as long as I don't get too picky there's more than enough available without paying gouged prices.
Downvotes from stimulation hounds lol.
What if someone other than me knows what baby Yoda is up to?
To repeat, I'm not saying I perfectly succeed at this.
lesbian-moon-gf is a goddess of curmudgeonry and I am now her high priestess
Not being able to use every server emoji on Discord is actually a good safeguard for NSFW spamming, because when trolls have to pay to be obnoxious, they usually stop doing it.
I agree on the premise as a whole, though. Our entire lives are getting enshittified with subscription models, designed to prey on those who forget to cancel or otherwise don't have the means or knowledge to get rid of it
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Self host on your desktop or laptop. Freedom is yours in FOSS.
What's this?
Wish I could get my dad to get this. I tell him I use an adblocker, he says why? He's never been bothered by it. His generation grew up in a technologically inconvenient time that he now glorifies today's streaming services, not seeing how they are enshittified. It's sad and I wish I could get him to understand.
In fairness, this streaming world is a marvel - if you can afford it. You can, for £100 a month, have access to damn near any piece of media that’s been published over the past 100 years. If you watch ten movies in a month you’ve spent the equivalent of buying ten DVDs ten years ago. Everything beyond that is pure profit.
But if you don’t have a spare £100 a month, you can get fucked. You can spend your time feeling like you’re missing out because you can’t afford Disney+ this month, and you’re trying desperately to avoid spoilers of the tentpole show they’ve just dropped.
Our parents (generally) can afford it, and can compare it to how it used to be. Hell, I’m 44 and I still see it as an incredible feat. But it’s one I’m tired of. So I pirate the few things that have piqued my interest, and browse my friend’s well stocked Plex library for other distractions. My sole subscription is Apple Music. I could pirate music and only ever use my iPod, but there are times when I prefer the convenience of my phone.
As for the ads: I’m British, so can only speak for times I visited the US as a kid; but TV advertising has long been WAY out of control over there. Ads, opening credits, ads, part one, ads, part two, ads, closing credits, ads. It’s fucking insane. Here in the UK, if you’re not watching BBC, it’s ads, part one, ads, part two, ads. Done. So from our perspective, advertising on the internet is mad. But to older Gen X/Boomer Americans, it’s just a way of life.
My kids get upset when I tell them that any particular piece of media (I’m SO TIRED of certain Disney movies) isn’t available. They have quite literally tens of thousands of choices that I never had growing up with broadcast TV only.
I recently setup magnetico and tuned its crawling to not be super disruptive to my network (ISP's shitty router doesn't have enough RAM to maintain a stateful firewall for NAT for all the sockets magnetico likes to open).
And slowly, I've been accumulating torrent hashes. In a couple of months, I'm up to 118k+. I've considered trying to merge in other people's magnetico databases. The point is to maintain my own search for torrents to avoid the the whack-a-mole that stupid governments play with torrent search sites.
A buddy of mine swears by usenet and uses a pretty cheap option for access.
All of that said about piracy: Support creators in your life. Cut off parasites.
If you have android you can also use Firefox to play YouTube in the background or when the screen is locked.
also with https://revanced.app
I've been doing that, but then it doesn't play the next video in the playlist. Which sucks because i can't listen to my favorite audiobook
I'm so glad that after signing up, Lemmy quickly showcased to me posts about opensource/ public alternatives for the apps/websites we normally use. It brings me such a reignited passion. In time I'm gonna change my email, cloud services, OS... Everything!
Nice. I felt the same way a few years ago and changed everything over 2 years. Best decision ever (besides having a child, that was a great decision as well.)
That's so motivating to hear because doesn't matter how long it takes as long as it gets done :') awesome!
"If you can't pirate it."
That's a skill issue.
git gud
For every person with the discipline to ignore subscription based services there are hundreds who go "but I don't get ads if I do"
We need more texts like these. Different people respond to different kinds of content/appeals. I personally very much agree with this but I think some people would reject the entire idea because they might draw their line at piracy; which can be shifted, and I think that's why we need way more of these messages
Oh, dear child, you have already succumbed, you're part of the machine, and you don't even know it. 😔 "This form of the Internet" == you are a consumer, passively ingesting the content created by the few, big players who gatekeep the marketplace of ideas. This is the Internet the capitalists want; you're just grousing about the details of paying for it.
The old promise of revolutionary change on the Internet was the idea that it would be an all-to-all media, that the users would create the content, and shape the message. So if you want to fight what the Internet is becoming, stop fighting the capitalists on their own turf. They don't care if some people pirate their stuff, as long as the money rolls in from the masses.
The best the can possibly happen if you teach everybody to pirate is to destroy the funding for content creation. Then all that will be left is the propaganda, the political ads, the messages pushed by somebody for ulterior motives. Unless...
Unless we teach the children to break that paradigm altogether. A person can live a happy life without any Hulu shows, or YouTube algorithms, or AAA games. Really. Become the creators. Leave the corporate walled gardens for the open, peer-to-peer Internet.
Or don't. It's hard, I know. Just don't pretend that your Jellyfin server means you've broken free of the system.
Nothing personal, but the way you put things comes across as quite sensationalist and "holier than though", mixed in with a bunch of claims that aren't well substantiated, but simply stated as fact. I feel like if you truly cared or believed in what you were saying you wouldn't package it in this sort of (frankly arrogant) manner.
Fun fact, waterfox or other GECKO browsers let you open YT in browser mode which cannot detect if your phone screen is on or not.
Here's the problem: the alternative is ads, and I don't think the ad model is sustainable.
I don’t think the ad model is sustainable.
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2024 was $49.235B, a 15.34% increase year-over-year. Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2024 was $188.261B, a 17.29% increase year-over-year. Alphabet annual gross profit for 2023 was $174.062B, a 11.13% increase from 2022. Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021. Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.They will make you pay and serve you ads, just like cable, just like cinemas, just like... Netflix
I pay for Netflix. I pay for Comcast. I pay Netflix to pay Comcast to allow me to have what I pay Netflix for in the first place.
Of course it’s not, but the alternative is not earning as much money, and the corporations can’t tolerate that. So they’ll keep juicing us for every last penny, all the while making ‘efficiency savings’ where they can.
Fuck knows what they’ll do next to make even more money, but the CEOs will have retired by then, so it’s Someone Else’s Problem.
This is the real issue. Companies/shareholders won't accept stable profits, so they will do anything possible to increase profits. AD-free subscriptions will be a thing of the past in the next 10 years and we will be right back to cable. Bundled subscriptions with cancellation terms and ads.
I also need to also underscore that the vast majority of profits are NOT going to the people who actually create the content, so these increases are just lining the pockets of shareholders and executives.
I am prepared to let them all burn down. I will never pay for YouTube or disable ublock origin. I'd rather have it die
I'm going to make a snarky old man statement. I don't mean it in a belittling way it's just something I do.
Start reading books, there are no ads. Reading is more difficult than watching television but boy it's amazing when you find a great story and you just can't put the book down.
the alternative: reasonable offerings and decent service
"no it couldn't be this, it must be ads"
Companies make way more money shoveling ads down our throats than they ever will from subscriptions. That's why subscriptions services end up having ads anyway... or doing things like Netflix whos offering a cheaper subscription that serves ads.
We'll never get companies to get away from ad revenue. It too easy of a way to make money.
Its not sustainable if you want infinite growth sure.
This post has a [email protected] feel to it.
Por un momento pensé qué era yo 😂
I feel this in my very soul
That feeling of disappointment turns to aggression. The good kind of aggression which makes me work harder to (jail)break stuff.
Inspiring plead
Stop online concentration camps! Stop internet dystopian! Stop cyber dictators!
Fight for net neutrality! Fight for privacy! Fight for internet freedom!
Comparing social media to nazi Germany where jews were mass murdered? That's extreme. 😳
Did TikTok just stop working in the browser completely? I won't download the app, but my family sometimes send me links to it and the videos never load anymore. I thought it was my VPN.
You usually have to remove anything after the numbers and "?", that should allow you to play it in the browser.
Seems to be so, it hasn't worked for me in sometime.
I'm using YouTube and its music app so much that Premium feels mostly fair
For now. Maybe. But look at Prime Video, that offered services for Amazon Prime Customers. Then put stuff behind paid "channels". Then started adding Ads to the start of a movie or episode. And it will water it down even further. Or Spotify that had ads every few songs. Then 2 ads. Then 2 very long ads. Then more ad breaks. Then You bought premium because the ads got more and more annoying. Now you are ad free. Except all the banners. Except the paid promoted Releases that get pushed in all the popular Playlists. Except ads during podcasts. Except "AI shuffle" that mixes in promoted songs.
The same will happen to YT Premium. Bit by bit ads will be smuggled in. I mean.. right now they promote "Premium light" after (what I've found for European prices) raising prices for premium and family tiers.
Honestly YT Premium has been a thing for a long time and it's done the opposite. There used to be exclusive shows that were made public later. (i.e. they were made public the day after i paid for my subscription)
I like YT Premium (and Twitch Turbo for that matter) for two reasons: they support creators (wayy higher CPM than ad-supported viewers), and they support the platform in a way that makes them less dependent from advertisers. If more people subsribed to YT Premium, their incentives would lean towards paid members and away from advertisers and music labels.
Having said that, i have ethical problems with both Twitch and Youtube, hence why i don't subscribe to either and subscribe to Nebula instead. It'll do until PeerTube becomes usable.
And? If they do that I'll just leave. It's not like someone forces me to subscribe
Same tbh, but when i look at my wage and how rent gobbles up 70% while groceries take another 20%...i cannot afford it.
Tough luck on them because i will just use it ad free for free. Just because my wage is ass doesn't make me less of a human where it gives them the right to waste my time inside my own private living space.
I paid for this space and i pay for this internet connection, i'm the one who's in charge here.
Amen!
I really don’t mind trading my money for value I receive. It doesn’t offend me.
As someone who has run businesses himself, I like being part of an economy where I can buy and sell things.
I don’t resent other people pirating stuff, and I don’t resent free services. I don’t mind donation-supported services. And I don’t mind paid services.
I guess it’s just who I am. I don’t really mind any kind of consensual economic arrangement people choose to form. Economic cooperation is economic cooperation.
I think it's more of a "give a mouse a cookie" problem. Paying for software i use had never been an issue for me unless the fee is insane eg Photoshop or something of the sorts. Subscriptions are fine as well but we all know the price will go up and the feature load won't or it might actually get worse. It's not just as simple as i use it therefore i pay for it.
The problem is it becomes coercive the moment dishonest wording by marketing and the actual product is observed.
I don't mind paying, but since I've set up jellyfin and the arr stack I'm getting a better service than anything you can actually buy.
I don't want to flick between a dozen apps to see which sliver of content they've allowed me to view.
If subscribing and paying for services actually guaranteed ad-free, useful and complete experiences, then yes I would gladly pay. When iTunes made buying songs for a dollar easy, I paid hundreds of dollars for them, because it gave me exactly what I wanted at a fair price.
Now, when you sign up for a service, you're still getting ads, you're still getting paywalls around the movies and shows you really want to watch, you're still getting your data mined and sold. You're still paying more than you would have paid for premium, ad-free cable TV back in the old days.
It's useless. I want to pay for good experiences and services, but they ain't offering it.
"Hey wanna hang out?"
"I can't sorry, a Catholic witch on the Internet was on her hands and knees crying begging me to live a tortured life and I felt bad telling her no"
Tiktok being able to display videos on desktop but not images is simultaneously hilarious and sad. It's baffling. Like why? How?
anti-adblock userscripts loaded into adguard for desktop helps too
Great summary and the guideline of my online life...
The issue is that some countries punish torrenting copyrighted material harshly. Like from fines to prison sentence, harshly. Because its a P2P connection, you're not only a consumer but also a distributor. And your ISP is fully obligated to give up your traffic data to the authorities, if asked. Almost everybody I know, knows a guy who had to pay +$3000 fines for downloading songs or movies trough torrent. The alternatives are hosting sites. But let's be honest, a 1080p fully length movie is upwards of 2GB, and most hosting sites either limit you to 500MB per day or give you a download speed of 100KB/s. Of course you could pay for a premium account, but A, this will leave a paper trail, and B, there are more hosting sites than streaming services, and the prices are somewhat the same. So for people in these countries it is not viable to just pirate everything.
Any VPN instantly solves this problem though?
Over the years i've torrented with no VPN, Tunnelbear, NordVPN, Mozilla VPN, and Proton; i'm pretty sure all of them messed up my torrenting in some way, not necessarily by making the connection slower, but by making some peers invisible and making me invisible to some peers.
And then there was Soulseek, which had me trying and failing to set up port forwarding. It was complicated and still didn't work as well as it would have if i didn't have a VPN.
Incidentally, i do need a VPN to torrent because i've gotten two fine-threatening letters already
I remember Nord premium had P2P servers, but the speeds where horrendous. Somewhere around 10.000 Kbits. downloading something meant that all the other programs that required bandwidth were almost unusable. I just settled on watching stuff through streams in 'meh' quality. Plus, a VPN just obscures your traffic from your ISP. But almost all mainstream VPNs have at some point either been caught or, admitted to keeping and sometimes selling backlogs. They're just as much of a leach on you wallet as any other subscription service.
Lots of countries just don't care about you downloading pirated content though, they just punish distribution.
I don't really have that problem but for the places that do punish downloading, I hear VPNs can be helpful to mask your traffic and that ISPs don't really care enough to pursue as long as you're not blatant about it and have plausible deniability ("no, I just downloaded a linux ISO that happened to be exactly the size of a whole season of <insert show>, total coincidence")
Obviously not legal advice though.
I pat for discord nitro so that I can stream netflix in 1080p to my friends who don't have it
Some people will link to Piped to avoid YouTube, some people will link to Bing Videos
What data stealing evil corpo site did she use to get this message out? X? 🤔
Tumblr.
While it's certainly not as evil as it's others, it was gutted when it was bought by Yahoo. It changed hands to Verizon and then Automattic. It was a tragic fall from grace.
So basically "Don't pay a fee to use a product or service".
I imagine this guy advocates for sneaking onto trains without paying the fare too, and shoplifting, etc. right?
Does he think products and services are magically free just because they're provided through a computer rather than over a counter, and that business shouldn't be allowed to charge money for them?
I get that this guy would rather go back to an internet where ad sales can pay for everything, but that's just not viable for a lot of people now. Heck, many online services today didn't even exist the way they do now 20 years ago, such as Netflix, and wouldn't ever have been viable funded by ad sales alone.
Should we just stop innovating and growing as a society, stop offering new goods and services because they're not viable in an ad sales only marketplace?
Plus, I bet this guy uses an ad blocker too, as most people that talk like this do. If he's actively fighting the very financial foundation he's advocating that we should go back to, what's his end game? How does he see this actually working?
What's his plan for how we're should fund all these global businesses and products and so on? Can't charge money, can't passively fund free at point of use services using ad and anonymous marketing data.... are businesses just supposed to print their own money?
Look, I don't love how expensive a lot of these products and services are, I totally get why people pirate stuff, and I don't like how the world wide web itself is becoming more of a small selection of walled garden services vs the millions of cool web pages and forums and such it used to be. That's a deeper problem outside of this scope granted, but I think this guy longs for those days a little too, and that's part of why he's rebelling against modern online businesses.
I'm not saying every company handles charging for their products well, or that they're affordable (but what is these days), look at Adobe for example. Or look at Unity's recent crazy ideas.
I'm just saying that simply advocating for a boycott of businesses for having the audacity to charge money for a service that costs money to provide is, well, shortsighted to say the least.
These aren't local government services paid for and provided free at point of use by our tax pounds like healthcare or the fire brigade, these are businesses - often global - that need to make money to survive (and yes I know a lot of them funnel too much of those profits to those who don't deserve it rather than their staff, but that's a whole other problem).
Yes, I long for a post scarcity, money free, star trek style society where everybody works for free just because they're passionate about what they do and want to create and share cool things, without actually needing to work to survive or thrive. I would LOVE that. But that civilisation doesn't exist for us yet, and we can't expect one portion of it - the Internet - to become that all on its own in a vacuum.
The problem isn't that people aren't willing to pay for their products, it's the fact that you give companies the little finger and they take the whole hand. They want to have their cake and eat it to. They want you to overpay and to be satisfied with bad service. They re-capitalize on content that has already turned a profit 20 years ago. I'm sorry but if I pay the equivalent of a movie ticket for a subscription and have to watch The Godfather with JPEG artifacts, they can kiss my ass.
Another keyword is "easily reproducible" which is the essence of digital data. If I steal something from the store, I stole a unique physical thing with inherit value attached to it. But if I am presented the choice between paying for lower bitrate movie or downloading the same movie for free in theater quality, I choose the later. Somehow the prices for subscriptions go up every year, but the amount of content and the quality decreases.
Additionally all streaming services take the liberty of revoking your 'license' to a bought (not rented or leased) product at any time. If I buy a movie on Amazon prime, they don't give you a .mp4, no you can only watch it on their app with their quality. They do not disclose that if I buy something with a one-time transaction, it is just a lease and I am in fact not owning what I paid for.
Over the last decade I paid thousands of dollars for subscription services, but I haven't gotten enough use out of them to justify what I paid. Hollywood made enough money off of me, so now I'm just helping myself to break even.
We don't want these conglomerates to survive though.. why do you? Opensource & public alternatives exist because people have a natural urge to help each other get their needs met. Why would you not want that over paying for a privatized internet?
Also, this logic doesn't apply the exact same way for real life services because there are a lot more extra steps in regards to politics. But the principle is the same. Some services should be public and governments should see the incentive to facilitate that when they witness the people provide for each other instead of relying on the whims of industry giants. Where would the money come from, you ask? Probably the "99%".
Let governments panic while conglomerates lose their money. Just let 'em! More people need to do this for it to make a dent though.
Fuck ChatGPT-bots.
Maybe this is a hot take, but this post is very entitled. Custom server emojis and using a video platform for audio only while your phone is sleeping as basic features? You can be annoyed that these are the features they chose to be premium or you can be annoyed by how much premium costs, but you are hardly missing out on the standard experience without them. Frankly, there are better choices to complain about being premium, but compared to the past the amount of stuff we can get from the internet for free at great convenience is incredible.
Also, piracy is easy. If you use the platform a lot and don't want to pay you can often get a premium or better experience with a bit of time invested for some setup. I use xManager for Spotify and ReVanced for Youtube. Both give me an ad-free experience for free and are more customizable than the legit application. ReVanced especially allows me to get rid of a lot of the UI I don't use, change input actions, skip sponsor/intro/afk segments, and a lot more. There might be something for Tiktok too now but I haven't looked.
The internet is worse than it used to be. Free internet services aren’t free because corporations want to help people out. They’re free because they’re trying to out-compete people who want to just help people and make the world a better place.
The early internet was a glimpse of how our world could be if we all just worked together, shared resources, followed our passions and collaborated to make cool things. There are still plenty of examples of products and services provided entirely free by people who do so just because they want to.
We get to see, in real time, what it looks like for private corporations to enclose common land, but digitally. And now people are forgetting - or maybe they didn’t even know to begin with - that all the shit that’s now covered with ads and has horrible design patterns - all used to be free.
This whole sequence does not make any sense. They are entitled for complaining about the standard experience, yet piracy is easy? What does that suppose to mean? If you think the standard experience is adequate then why resort to piracy? What is the entitlement referring to? According to you they can complain about the pricing and a lot of other features being paywalled, but the entitlement comes from the particular two examples they gave? Because you don't think they are important, as if the important features to you are universal? I don't get what the point of this is
The entitlement comes from the idea that these are basic features that should be available to them for free, in addition to everything else included in the free service. They are the sort of things casual users may not even be aware of. If they don't think the extra stuff is worth the price, they can just not buy them. But thinking they are overvalued is not the same thing as thinking they should be free.
If you think the standard experience is adequate then why resort to piracy?
Because I use these a lot and want something better than the standard service when it's an option. If you wanted to sell a car for $5000 and someone offered you $10,000, would you say no because $5000 was adequate?
Because you don't think they are important, as if the important features to you are universal?
I guess "importance" is relative, so I'll clarify; they do little to contribute to the main function of the apps. Youtube is a video platform, so it should allow you to watch hosted videos. Discord is a voice and text messaging app, so you should be able to send messages and join calls. They are robust enough that you can do many other things with them too, but these secondary offerings are sometimes more limited if you don't pay. The people that do choose to pay supplement the cost of offering the basic services to those that don't.
Unfortunately the buy in to start pirating is more expensive these days. You need a decent computer, decent internet, gotta pay for a vpn because the free ones don’t really work. It’s almost not worth the trouble.
It's definitely not. You can pirate things on nearly any running home computer. You can find an app like Flud and do it on your Android. You can pay like 8 bucks a month for a seedbox and just copy the file to where you want it after.
If you just want to save some money over subscriptions, but not keep the files, you can setup something like real debrid and stremio for around 15 dollars every 6 months.
You should use a paid VPN but they're all far cheaper than any of the subscription services you'd stop paying for by doing this. (That I know of)
(USD)
Just don't use a VPN company that pays people to spread misinformation on YouTube.
