My "favorite" lecture from young people is the one in which they berate me for "stealing content" by not watching ads on YouTube.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
I don't understand why they think we care if we're stealing content regardless. I pirate movies and TV shows, but they don't whine about that, in fact, most will approve of it. Why draw the line at YouTubers?
They often say that we're screwing the person who runs the channel. In reality, I'm willing to bet my left nutsack that they make a fuckton more from the occasional donations than from ads, once Google, MCNs, and the government take their share.
YouTube has increased the amount of ads that used to be standard by about 1000%. You used to get about 22-26 minutes of actual content per 30 minutes of viewing. On YouTube it's about 2 minutes of advertising per 0.5-3 minutes of viewing. The majority of the things I watch on YouTube are short 30 second videos to see specific things, but Google seems to think it's okay to show me 2-3 minute long commercials before letting me see the 30 second blurb telling me the foot pounds per square inch I need to apply to my brake calipers before I can finish my brake change job. This is even more annoying now that Google doesn't surface this type of information on regular websites, where I can just quickly read the spec.
It feels like YouTube has become the new Hollywood with production companies and YouTubers becoming celebrities and whatnot. Such a far cry from it's beginnings as a place where people would upload random family videos that nobody watched.
The family members watched them, which was good enough for the person uploading it. Not everything needs to be about money and exposure. Ugghh! K.k kill me.
I have an honest question and I feel like Lemmy is a good place to have a real discussion on this. To preface this, I use adblock too so I'm kinda calling myself a hypocrite with this question :P
Why do we expect any free service not to have ads? If a paid service like Netflix introduced ads I'd be pissed, and same goes for cable TV these days. But why would something free like Youtube not have ads? How can we be bothered by ads on a service we're getting for free?
Someone help me reconcile this for my own well-being haha.
Why do we expect any free service not to have ads?
Youtube has the right to serve ads along with the content, but it does not have the right to dictate what I can or can't do with the data once it hits my machine. It has no more right to hijack my property to force them upon me than it does to strap me to a chair and force my eyes open, A Clockwork Orange style.
If Youtube doesn't like that arrangement, its recourse is to serve a 403: forbidden instead of the video data.
Ads arent inherently the problem. The problem is that the user experience often gets ruined because, for example, on certain news sites every paragraph of text you read, you get a full page ad. Imo when its like this its fully acceptable to not let them have limited revenue from you.
You're asking someone who'd spent a good chunk of my life creating Skyrim mods for free and volunteering for services in my community with no recompense or desire for money how I expect people to contribute things they presumably enjoy without getting paid? To be clear, you're asking me this from a server on a federated platform that is held together with community love and free-will donations?
I know we've been conditioned by capitalism to reduce everything to its monetary worth, but I feel like we should know better here.
To add on to what the others have said, there should always be competition between free and paid services. Free services should provide only what they are capable of with the limitations they operate under due to a donation model, while paid services can use all the advantages they can get with advertising, big budgets for hosting, etc. Free and open-source often still won under these conditions. Think Encarta against Wikipedia. If paid wins, that's fine, people can still have a reasonably good alternative with the free option.
The problem arises when a corporation builds on the back of a free resource, and then starts charging users once the network effects kick in. With YouTube, Google was able to leaverage 20 years worth of videos that people lovingly uploaded (although 10 of those years were in the post-ad plagued world) and then start forcing people to bend to their monetization rules. Most of those people didn't upload to YouTube because they wanted to make money off their videos, they just wanted to share a funny video. If given the choice, they would have chosen free instead of ad-driven. We have no choice since all that content is now locked behind YouTube's ad walls.
The ads themselves are not a problem. The problems are
It can be security risk. Even Google has ads that redirect to malicious domain
Ads that are getting in the way of accessing information. That includes popups, automatically playing videos etc. Hell, one of the major reason why I started using adblock was to block those annoying flash banners.
The frequency is just way too much. This leave no money on table mentality makes me not give a shit.
Now it's so commercialized that I'm not posting anything on YouTube anymore, simply because I know that I'm going to get so many emails about how my video of me building a Lego set or whatever, violated some new social taboo that was invented 5 minutes ago, and how they are going to send the YouTube police after me to send me to the shadow Realm
Really? I still randomly upload videos of me gaming, sometimes with background music, but no titles or voice-overs and I never get any comments or emails. I must not be offending people correctly.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
this is now TikTok. YouTube hasn't been that platform for a long time, since at least Vine.
Not really going to get into it with you, because you clearly have your mind made up, but you pretty much nailed why at the end.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
People spend a lot of time and money making videos these days. They aren't just random low quality things. They have teams of sometimes hundreds, use cameras worth half a million dollars, and may take a week or month to record said video while paying those hundreds of employees.
Again, not going to change your mind, Lemmy is very open about not giving a shit about others when it comes to money, but it's not 2006 anymore, and people need to make their money back AND pay their employees.
Personally I'm fine watching a few ads to support the content I clearly want to watch. Seems weird you'd be interested enough in what someone has to show you, but refuse to help them in any way, but whatever.
Remember guys, don't forget to hit the downvote button if you haven't already. How dare I say anything positive that isn't just "fuck ads, fuck YouTube, fuck everyone!"
Tell me how to filter all that highly polished crap from my feed and searches, because I don't want it. I hate all that shit being shoved at me. If I wanted to watch someone spouting bad takes with a highly polished commercial-friendly veneer, I'd watch cable. I hate all those monetized channels, and they can all go under for all I care, along with that entire hellsite. Then more people would support actually good non-monetized projects like peertube.
Even if what I'm doing is stealing, it's a good thing. Can't wait for YouTube's demise. It's not a fun site to use anymore because all the good non-monetized content gets buried in favor of these soul-sucking assholes.
I don't even click people's links anymore, because it's always some rich bearded white male with the most painful content.
If they use all that stuff to shoot the video, it means they already made it or they spent money they shouldn't have.
I didn't mind getting a handful of ads an hour, i do mind that i now get like 20 minutes to watch some youtube because adulting sucks and Youtube is like: swallow these 7 ads bitch, guess what bitch we forgot we showed you 7 have some more cunt and now my 20 minutes is fucked, so i say: time for Youtube to get bent.
If what i hear is right, they are and have been operating in the red for a long time. Half of their creators are better business people than they are.
If you feel that way, you should really be paying for YouTube premium, since that actually gives more money to the creators you watch than ads would. That's the one thing that sold me on it.
Honestly it doesn't seem to take very long at all. I watched live as the insurrectionists attempt to overturn democracy in the US during their failed auto-coup on January 6th less than 3 years ago.
Though there was some "it's not real" talk in the immediate aftermath the idea that it was a false flag, antifa, not an insurrection, not a big deal, just tourists having an afternoon scroll, etc. seems to be growing.
I wonder why the "left wing radical Democrat antifa operatives engaging in a false flag attack to make Trump look bad" marched under banners with Trump's name, admitted they were doing it for Trump, in some cases ran for office on the Republican ticket, and are actively being protected by Republican politicians.
A recent Behind the Bastards on Alex Jones (part 1) has recordings of Info Wars from January 6 - before Jones had had a chance to call in and tell them to shut the fuck up before they got noticed as being complicit
It's funny (and scary) hearing them being like, "It's all happening! The second American Revolution is underway! The Patriots have control of the Capitol!"
Jones quickly learned that he needs his listeners to be "panic-adjacent" rather than actually in panic mode. Panicking people don't buy brain pills.
It was a near immediate campaign to convince people not to believe their lying eyes and ears. I think deep down, the spin doctors know that they're lying though.
“Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Conspiracy people swing from "I only believe my own eyes and ears" to "I don't believe even what I see". Essentially the only reality is the construct in their minds and it will be defended at all costs to protect their ego.
Same thing in Canada with the fucker convoy in Ottawa. Traitors tried to overthrow a democratically elected government, literal fascists were present and Ottawa was held captive by these morons. Conservatives attempt to frame it as fake and a party. Fuck them.
The hell? None of what you just said happened. There were a lot of attempts to make that seem so. Remember the rash of police chiefs resigning and that bullshit with the stolen semi full of guns from a cop shop? The only literal fascists there were the fucking cops you clown.
I was sitting in a control room at work while it was happening and all the conservative coworkers I had were saying “Look at all those Antifa’s pretending to be Trump supporters!”
Probably the same people who go "The government is incapable of running anything" and the next thing out of their mouth is how the government is running some perfectly secret massive plot. Somehow it is top secret but people like them know about it.
Yeah they fucking broadcast that whole thing at much as they could. They thought they were the heroes sweeping in to save the day and they would be vindicated.
Well, see, the mistake was expecting any of this to make sense. They gave up on even pretending to make sense a long time ago, it is all Gish galloping away now - because, as long as you say the Magic Keywords that make people's brains make with the angry chemicals, it doesn't actually necessarily matter what else you say.
I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there's plenty of things to point to to back it up.
But then you have older people like my father who...I don't know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It's impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that's not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.
My favorite was arguing with a much older (late 70s) friend of my dad's about how Obama ruined the economy and stock market, and when I told him that was objectively not true and the GFC was in full swing well before Obama was even elected, he was like "I know because I owned stocks and stuff, how would you even know?" Even when I pulled up a graph of the S&P 500 and showed the days he was elected and sworn in, he just said "Oh, that can't be right, the graph must be wrong". Showing the DOW and other composites from multiple sources did nothing to convince him. He was absolutely positive his retirement fund was doing great up until Obama was elected.
Yes Jerry, I'm sure that the entire stock market was just wrong, and it's not the fact you consume nothing but FOX News and will only refer to the 44th president as "The N*gger" potentially causing a bit of bias.
something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history.
That's what they want you to think.
Sadly, "they" has shifted from "the gubment" to "the Jews".
It was weird to read about protests that I attended that were completely different from my experience. That was the first time I realized that no one in the media necessarily eventually gets the story right.
What would you think if your parents say it's time to put you up for adoption every time you get into an argument? What a fucking weird thing to get upset over and think of throwing your parents away just because of an argument
Or maybe someone rewrote the books. I've long had a suspicion a lot of the Mandela effect is just people with long memories who missed the propaganda rewrite.
I find it strange that people somehow mistrust all of the news and history of today but think the very same news sources and historians of the past were somehow accurate.
The news is written in a hurry. History is written with perspective. Both are drawing upon the same sources in the modern era except the history has more time to cross reference them. It is only natural that we get a better, clearer version of history as time and research is allowed to work on it.
I really hope this is just missing the /s at the end.
But in case it isn't...
Which is more likely? That all the media outlets have gone through all of their records and replaced them with different records and all the books out there have been trashed and replaced with new books saying different things and the internet has been scrubbed of all of the real stories and photos and replaced with fake ones? Or that a few misguided people, who weren't paying very close attention in the first place, misremembered an event?
As an early GenX whose been online since the BBS days this happens all the time but honestly the historical revisionism isn't main problems, it's the loss of context around the history.
I second this! I used to make day-long deliveries across the Kansas plains and listening to Dan Carlin wax eloquent about the rise and fall of the Persian Empire or the Rape of Nanking kept me engaged and entranced the entire time.
I still remember the so-called Greatest Generation and Silent Generation falling in love with Reagan, combined with Baby Boomer hedonistic indifference, resultng in liberal Democrats getting ripped to shreds at the ballot box. As an adapt-or-die reaction to Bernie-style Democrats getting electorally decimated in the 80s and 90s, the Democratic Party shifted to the center... and republicans got batshit insane with AM radio and 24-hour propaganda television.
Recent history has showed me in real time how it takes several elections to smash something down... or build something up. Yet there are too many people who seem to believe that one single election is a magic wand that can cure every goddamned evil in politics and society. And if they don't get what they want, they don't vote again, or they tune out entirely - "there were elections? I didn't notice" - constantly putting Democrats in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
Case in point of Democrats getting bold: LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.
Also, Democrats have to deal with hysterical and/or opportunistic right wing shitheads who abuse their power to sabotage every policy proposal, or even the normal functioning of the government at every level, pointless government shutdowns that paralyze the entire apparatus, including day-to-day essentials like teachers and park rangers.
Fascist bastards who enjoy flirting with visions of dictatorship... as long as they're the dictator. Who are constantly looking for ways to subvert democracy. Nixon, Cheney, the orange intestinal parasite.
This is the math Democrat politicians have to work with whenever making a far-reaching decision.
Complicating the hellish job even further, there's all those fickle, cherry-picking oh-so-pure voters who demand being catered to instantly and get their "knowledge" from twitter, a noisy drag on the equation.
Since the 90s, the right wing bastards have perfected the dark art of exploiting 24-hour mass media to keep people rabidly ignorant, to divide and conquer with a "politics for idiots" mantra that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.
LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.
I get this every time someone says "both sides are the same!" Like, I've watched who's started basically every major military conflict in my life, who keeps cutting taxes for the rich and who keeps gutting social programs that would benefit the poor, who keeps trying to remove rights and prevent others from getting the rights they're owed, who's tanked the deficit and brought this country to near financial collapse multiple times, etc.
It's like accelerated around politics in general though. People will still foam at the mouth about how all of the accusations against Trump are just a psyop to bring down their one true god. Meanwhile, he's standing there holding a selfie cam like "what's up my true believers, I totally did every single thing they said and I'd do it again twice with your mother and Jesus himself watching." People out there still saying Trump isn't a rapist after not only a court of law found him to be one, and -literally everyone has heard a tape of him telling you exactly how to do sex crimes.- But it's like that for everything. Republicans are just straight up saying shit right into the microphone, and then 30 seconds later pretending like it's never happened.
I was telling someone much younger than myself that airports didn’t always completely suck to go through. I explained how the TSA wasn’t a thing and the experience was closer to getting on a bus or a train pre 9/11.
He had a hard time wrapping his head around it because he’s never experienced it.
As a post 9/11 adult, moving to a place with really good and smooth flowing train infrastructure made me so frustrated with the stressful and unnecessary security theatre of airports worldwide
Take your shoes off. Take your belt off. Step into the scanner. Is that bottle more than 3.4 ounces? It looks like it's 3.42 ounces. Throw it out. Put your belt back on. Put your shoes back on. Did you pack your bags yourself? Have your bags been in your possession since you packed them? Take your shoes back off. In 2015 TSA missed 95% of weapons that a red team attempted to smuggle through security. Put your shoes back on.
I traveled via airline before and after 9/11, and taking trains still amazes me: I can just walk up to it with my bag and get on??? I don't even have to go into the station if it's not between the parking and the platform! (The station I usually use is like that.) Plus the comfortable seat with legroom...
On the other hand, there's my dad defending Apartheid with the defence "you weren't there". The whole rest of the world from the time seemed to agreed with me, too, Dad.
It made the world weird - especially politics. I still attribute the extreme polarization that we see today to the aftermath of 9/11.
Don't get me wrong, I know people had strong opinions before 2001, but it didn't seem like political party was as significant a part of the average person's identity like it is now.
I think there's a pretty strong case that the polarization started before 9/11 - Rush Limbaugh, talk radio conservatism, and the race for evangelicals had been making US conservatives more polarized since the 1980s. The attacks might have made it more apparent, but commentators were decrying polarization in the 1990s.
It's concerning that people still upvote regurgitated content here. It doesn't bode well for the future of the website, since there is already so little content here compared to Reddit.
I can't even begin to dismantle everything that's wrong with that. To start, the Epsteinsgates event was a false flag perpetrated in response to Hunter Biden outlawing red hats in 2018. Popular video essayist Malcom X. King Jr later satirized these events in his humorous Patreon exclusive of the same name.
It's not quite a historical event, more of a bit of trivia, but it seems to be common knowledge that it's possible to cheat at Duck Hunt by pointing the light gun at a light bulb, making it register a hit every time, often repeated as a sort of "look how far we've come, those silly game devs in the 80s missing such an obvious exploit."
Except it doesn't work. The light gun checks for a frame of darkness followed by a frame of light. If it picks up light when it's not supposed to, it counts it as a miss because it knows what you're pointing at isn't the screen at all. But people in all corners of the internet are absolutely convinced this trick was a thing for some reason.
Meaningless sentence. Research is a loose definition, memories are loose definition. Research is written by people with memories. Memories are written by first hand research. Words are cheap. Nothing is real
One disorientating thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well
Reminds me of the time I got a quiz question wrong; who was the first Man on the Moon.
I wasn't born, but everything I've ever read said it was Neil Armstrong, so that's what I answered.
The idiot quiz master said it was Buzz Aldrin (the second man). In disbelief, I tried to educate them of their error, only for the rest of the room, mainly boomers, to tell me I was wrong. Including one guy in his 80s who said "It was definitely Buzz. I watched it when it happened. I remember it well".
I asked him "who said the famous 'one small step for man'?"
Him: "Ahh yes, Now that was Armstrong."
Me: "Surely Buzz would say those words if he was the first one out. I mean there is literally video of the event. You even watched it live"
Him: "Yes, it's Armstrong in the video. But Buzz was definitely first out. Who do you think was holding the camera?"
I experienced this when talking with the zoomers in my office. Feeling old aside, the satisfaction I had when I basically said I was there when the old magic was written was extremely satisfying. Now I understand why the old people loved to do that so much.
My 13-year-old loves researching weird stuff from the past on the internet. I actually enjoy it when she comes up with something I already knew about because it's a chance to educate her further.
It's easy to blame young adults for being ignorant, but here's another question: Who was in charge of schooling us when we were children and teens who should have been taught historical events like this in a dedicated environment for learning? Who defunded public schools to the point where teachers have to buy their own school supplies and schools literally have to force students to guilt trip strangers into buying chocolate bars to fundraise? Who thought extracurricular programs like history clubs were wastes of money and the children not only didn't deserve them, but that we're the entitled selfish generation for wanting them?
Now more and more young adults are self-learning things like this on our own time by taking online courses, but according to the boomers that's apparently also a sign of our failure.
weaken steel beams enough to compromise their structural integrity and cause the floors of a tower to collapse and cause a cascade of critical failures
It's comments like these that show that people don't actually research anything, they just regurgitate "sound bites" that give off the impression of being science but are actually misdirection. It makes us feel smart without having to put in any effort. So we parrot ourselves into ignorance and all it takes is complacent media that asks no real questions.
Yes it sounds plausible that fires weaken a building. But it doesn't matter how plausible something sounds, if the evidence contradicts it, you don't reject the evidence, you reject the theory.
NIST, who investigated the WTC disaster, said in its report "no steel was recovered that reached temperatures hot enough to weaken". And no, the issue is not simply the failure to recover it.
Oh yeah....it's kind of a bummer.
"Aw, buddy! I know it's all so new and exciting for you, but I've been there. I saw it live..."
You don't want to be that guy, but it can be tiring sometimes....
If someone's take on 9/11 doesn't go back to at least the early 1980s, it's probably not worth taking too seriously. It didn't start on 9/11, that's just the date millions of people were forced into hearing about the messy and complex conflicts. A witness on ground zero doesn't become a 9/11 expert.
The 4th season of the podcast Blowback does an excellent job of covering the background, both within and beyond the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I highly recommend it.
This is pretty much my experience when watching an episode of Adam Ruins
Everything. Remember when we thought that show was actually right about stuff?
It can have half truths but it's really hard to be factual when trying to sell a show. Adam is a comedian and an entertainer so any information that can be snagged regardless of validity serves the objective.
It's typically really hard to keep people engaged when you are trying to give neuace and data that's not as conclusive as we want. Hell, I'm trying to be as objective as possible in this and it's boring me.
Part of the problem is trying to be authoritative with broad conclusions. You can have a documentary cover a story or a person's life while being thorough and entertaining, but things like an overall industry's practices are just too complicated to go over quickly. People are going to have lots of varying experiences with it, and just giving facts about it misses human elements that allow people to imagine being there. It needs to be a story, but just one story also can't apply to everyone.
Every time someone finds a new way, a new understanding of everything, then in our misery when our knowledge failed to bring us any new power or ability, we realize that our knowledge was bullshit and we are just as confused as ever before
hbomberguy recently had a video that "ruins" Youtubers who have been very successful from educational videos while using blatant plagiarism. It's 4 hours long but it's very engaging and might be something you enjoy.
The sound or design choices that come to define a decade, often pre-date it.
Eg. House music originated in the 80s but became mainstream in the 90s. So if I popped on a random 80s house track, if you don't know your stuff, you're likely to think it's 90s.
Yeah, often sounds progress over several years and you might have someone from one decade that was a groundbreaker, and then tons of bands 5 years later sound like them.
I am a giant music nerd and it is really weird how often I am completely wrong about the year that bands/albums came out. It's pretty much just early 80s vs late 80s for me though.
To be fair I'm old enough that it's all starting to run together now. Just last night my husband and I were arguing about what year the Deftones White Pony album was released. I remembered completely wrong.
The only way I can have any accuracy about a pop culture event is if I can associate that event with a concrete event that happened in my life (and I remember the date of). It makes it fairly easy to remember events that happened when I was in school (what grade was I in? what year was I in that grade?) but harder for things since I have been working (where did I live/work? well that narrows it down to a few years).