THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.
That's because all the good shit* comes from humans.
*but also so much bad shit. So so so much bad as well.
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.
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.
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.
FreeTube is pretty good as well. Using it on Debian (or Mint).
+1 to FreeTube. It just sucks that all these players typically use the same YouTube.js lib. So when google fucks with that lib (because they definitely cat-and-mouse that shit), it breaks so many.
That's my fear as well. Google breaks literally everything they touch.
100%.
SponsorBlock on SmartTube is incredible. Saved so much time
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.
Especially stop using Discord as a support forum for your software project. That's the most daft thing ever conceived.
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…
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.
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?
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.
this post is 100% right, anyway stop buying phones, you don't need them.
I wish to go even further.
Remember when the internet was prviate, anonymous, cool, and had more than three websites?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
If you have android you can also use Firefox to play YouTube in the background or when the screen is locked.
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.
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"
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 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
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.
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