Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?

lionkoy5555@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 1571 points –

YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?

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That doesn't fix YouTube's core issues with the ads that they run, impacting every free user without an ad blocker: 1) Not 100% safe 2) Unscrupulous advertisers, sometimes running scam ads 3) Poor user experience re: ads (far too many in general, and multiple mid-roll ads per video make for a horrendous time).

I'm not going to reward them for these misbehaviors toward their user base by buying their "Premium" service. Same for any other site that does this and offers a "Premium service" to fix the problem that they, themselves, created. There are ways to have safe ads, and fair user experience even with them in play.

Yeah, Youtube seriously needs to improve ad quality. I personally totally get that it's an expensive site to run and have no problems with the fact that it needs to turn a profit (not every site can get by on donations alone and that's okay). But the ads can get really bad sometimes. The majority are fine, but the number of scams and NSFW ads are still too high.

TBH, I just paid the extra $2 to go from Youtube Music to Youtube Premium because I really didn't want to see those ads and didn't wanna deal with figuring out ad blocking for a Chromecast. But Youtube Premium isn't worth it if you're not already using Youtube Music (I would not have paid $12 for it) plus you have to use Youtube a certain amount for it to be worth it. Plus, of course, it shouldn't be necessary to pay them not to see ads just to avoid seeing the bad ads.

And all this does nothing about Youtube recommending videos (not ads) that are unethical. They don't do a good job at curating videos. Heck, there's been times where they age restrict LGBT videos for simply having any LGBT references but they'll leave up crypto scams and hate speech filled alt right videos.

For me personally, its not even the principle with the bad ads. The reasons I won't pay for preemium are:

  1. 12$ is too much, since I don't live in the US and my pay is not at that level.
  2. I won't pay to still have my data harvested and sold. If I pay for YT, there should be a different privacy policy with not using the data for anything outside video recommendations.
  3. I don't want to pay for all the antifeatures YT pushes such as removing dislikes, not allowing channel search on mobile, messing with search reaults and recommendations...

The bottom line is that I decide what content is received, interpreted, and rendered by my hardware. Youtube can kick and scream all they want, the nature of the internet is not in their favor.

Intel is about to disagree with their DRM bullshit baked right into your CPUs silicon. Welcome to the "You will own nothing" future

I'm pretty sure if they actually do that it has far reaching consequences and will get killed within a year by financial institutions. That is a massive security issue. Also AMD would rub their hands because it will flush a lot of money into their pockets to develop alternatives. They are already winning with CPUs.

It does not cause security issues (that banks are concerned about). It is a DRM content decryption that is part of their TPM. So it is even considered a security feature that can more generally be used to ensure data can only be decrypted using the proper application the data was intended for. Netflix is already using it for 4k streaming. Read more here.