What a useless headline. They could write it hundreds more times for the hundreds of other subs still in revolt.
BromSwolligans
joined 2 years ago
Sucks for me. I use iOS (I'm sorry) and that's the original reason I got YouTube Red (back then): they make iOS users pay for background playback. Most of my YT consumption is documentary / essay / spoken word stuff so I need that feature to treat it like a podcast player, basically. Most of the rest of my YT consumption is in my living room, where ad blocking isn't an option (and I hear even if it was, they're catching up fighting ad blockers).
I hate the Web 2.0 "enshitification" of platforms, and I hate advertisements, and I'm willing to pay for a good, useful service. But this is a mixed bag. It's still 'enshitified' because most of what it serves me is algorithmic and nothing to do with the hundreds of channels I've subscribed to over the 13 years I've had this particular account. It's still chock full of ads because videos do sponsor blocks these days.
And the worst of it is they've got you by the balls and there's really nothing stopping them from being Netflix and just continuing to raise and raise the price. I was an OG Netflix Instant Streaming for Xbox 360 user...years later when they finally booted me off my own family plan, we were paying like...$23 a month? For what had at that point become the worst video service? What stops YouTube from bumping up to $19.99/mo a couple years from now? It's the only game in town.
OH and they're also selling all your metrics. That's the other thing. If I'm paying (through the nose) for a service, it shouldn't be double-fucking me by selling predictive measures of who I am and what I care about to filthy fucking "advertisers" (for-profit behavior manipulators).
YouTube (like every last piece of Web 2.0) was fun while it lasted. But it is now barely better than worthless.
Spotify has higher bitrate files than YT Music.
Smooth Jazz and 80s music. I had to work real hard to like vegetables. It's an ongoing saga. But one day smooth jazz and 80s music just hit me, and woke something up deep in my spinal column. It's purely nostalgia, and the initial delivery method was probably Spotify being very liberal with recommendations based on vaporwave and synthwave stuff. But synth and sax and all the stuff I used to find tacky and irritating as a child just made me feel at home. The word nostalgia gets abused these days but my sudden appreciation for the sounds of my childhood and the way they consistently make me feel like I'm nestled snug into the beige carpet of a Huber home, just existing without a care in the world…that's some deep nostalgia. And it's also nice to mentally congratulate myself on evolving to appreciate stuff I was too snobby or dense or whatever to like growing up.
Denied.
Sometimes I open up the home page to see what's up, then I see what's up is less interesting than it used to be and less interesting than what's happening here. And I close it pretty quickly. I'm still using it as part of my Google searches when I need quick human answers. It's gonna continue to be a historical resource in that regard. No getting around that. But my account only exists so that I can access those resources without too much fuss. It's not something I use to post or contribute. I used the Sign In With Apple feature to just generate a throwaway anonymous account after I deleted my 11 year old account.
It's good for reviewing and giving high marks for searchability, but right now I'm having a better time with the beta version due to the absolutely insane rate of progress the dev makes every day.
Hard to say. You don't know how those miles were acquired. But you do have a pretty good idea that it was unethical / rule breaking or morally wrong / harmful to someone.
On the one hand the damage is already done. On the other hand you are in a position to reward or not reward the person or a person in a chain of responsibility for doing that harm, and encouraging them to do it again.
It's the same basic argument as viewing stolen or otherwise immoral pornography. Yes the damage has already been done and you're not necessarily directly harming the subject of the video by viewing it. On the other hand you are creating the market or feedback to incentivize the person who made or stole that content to do so again.
A less dramatic and maybe more relatable example is if you've considered buying a scalped PS5 or RTX card. Every one you buy is telling that scalper "this was worth your time, you were right to do it, and you should do so again in the future, no matter how many honest, hardworking joes like me cannot get a PS5 or RTX card for themselves or their kid at a fair price."
I guess ask how much your integrity is worth. Is it the cost of airfare? Because integrity, as they say, is doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
That 'motivation' bit is so important. Former educator, currently still working in education, and I'm always wary of anything that makes a sweeping statement about 'the kids' not being 'all right'. But there are important, substantial contributors to undesirable outcomes that need to be acknowledged. Poverty being one, as well as the cycle of poverty and abuse which is deeply tied to white flight and de-industrialization (which we might collectively assign to the death of the American dream if we aren't too concerned with being precious about the the notion of patriotism).
Saying 'iPads' or 'TikTok' is the culprit doesn't help anyone. But iPads and TikTok are contributing factors because they both exacerbate the feeling that being entertained is enough to scrape one's way through life at the bottom of the barrel of expectations...as well as over-informing young people (and adults) that there is positively nothing left to look forward to. Industry is collapsing, housing and transportation are unaffordable, everything you once expected to purchase (and let's not get lost talking about purchasing as a metric for determining whether one is living a good life) has now moved to an ever-bleeding subscription model; inflation is compounded by corporate greed (and maybe we should talk about how the business incentive of endless growth contributes to every other problem) and corporate greed (something no one but the executives and their shareholders can influence, let alone control) is raping all the natural splendor, wealth and even health and stability of the very ground we walk on and air we breathe.
Why the fuck wouldn't some young person whose future job prospects (which were shit to begin with) are being devoured by AI, just turn toward the boundless font of readily accessible entertainment rather than going uphill toward seemingly fruitless self improvement? Why would they bother to rise to the level of literacy that allows them to appreciate a 19th century classic translated from the original Russian, or to parse the dense theming of some modern masterpiece? What's the reward, to someone whose entire life to this point has been flavored with instant gratification? To them it's all just 'content', and there's plenty of content more accessible than literature. Art may mean nothing for many reasons, not least of which is it can be falsified to a level of acceptability (AI songs by dead artists, for example).
It's a Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Brave New World living nightmare. But what is the alternative? What systems or entities or organizations are coming to save the day? There are none. This moment is a gruesome forbidden experiment: it is a post-Reaganite, neoliberal race to the cultural bottom, and the youngest generation are the lab rats.
I missed whatever moment; what's the deal with all the bean posting?
Speaking as someone who never really plugged into Twitter much in the first place: the notion that tweets have any sort of real value and that putting caps on consuming them is a meaningful control measure is the funniest fucking thing. Like no doubt he I actually trying to ruin it, that's happening. But this is clearly supposed to elicit some kind of reaction, and I just can't imagine feeling like, "oh, no, this only 600?" 600 of what? Brainfarts? Serious ideas that, if they were written by serious people would be in a long form medium? It's like saying "you can go to the grocery store but you can only buy 60 chew toys for your dog per day". Like, okay, I wasn't going to do that anyway and I think it's funny that you thought I was going to, or that I'd care about this new limitation.
I still type shitty things. But then I stop and rephrase in a more human way.