Twitter has only lost ~10% of it's userbase after repeatedly abusing its own users. Reddit probably less. After everything we've learned about Meta, tens of millions of people signed up on day 1 to join their new service, Threads. Google Chrome still has like 80% market share.
Changing is honestly a trivial ask, but we won't, because no one cares.
It's not that no one cares, per se. We just live in a society where the majority of working adults are fucking exhausted. They have bills to pay, uncertain job security, seemingly constant climate crises/natural disasters in many geolocations (e.g. Canada and US West Coast wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), hyper polarized partisanship in many countries (yeah, it isn't unique to the US), and on and on. That Google, Microsoft, or Amazon own the internet is such a low priority to the much more immediate, life threatening/living security concerns of the majority of people.
I care, but I also understand why many people do not.
Man, I would love to run a Linux box and still be able to run the like 4 programs I use my computer for, but I don't have any interest in running an OS I have to build and make work. I got Redhat working once (feels like a million years ago) and I am just not that interested in my PC anymore. It's a tool. I want it to work without any fiddling on my part. It has exactly 5 programs it ever has to run. I touch it on the weekends. Windows it is.
This is me agreeing with you in every way.
Fwiw Linux is way easier today than it was a million years ago. Honestly I find it simpler to use than Windows.
It might be, but it still adds steps that I no longer have the patience for.
Try it, Linux Mint just works put of the box, easy as hell. Even has GUIs for everything.
LOL that makes zero sense. It takes 5 minutes to switch to a different browser or service. If they were tired or didn't have time, they wouldn't be spending it on Twitter and Reddit.
It's not really the time. It's more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.
Sure, it's easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it's there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.
Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.
The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.
This just sounds like a bunch of non-sense, making up excuses for people making poor decisions. Like you can't blame every bad decision on "wahhhh life is hard!"
No, it's not excuses, it's just reality. It's hard. Does that mean people shouldn't try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.
The thing is, just because people aren't doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn't mean that they aren't in other areas that you may not know about.
For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn't leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that's ok.
Just be the best human you can be every day and don't beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.
No, it's not excuses, it's just reality. It's hard.
It's not hard. It isn't. Not even a little.
If that doesn't leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that's ok.
No one is talking about "supporting" FOSS. We're talking about using less exploitative software and services.
Spend 3 seconds Googling and install and use anything that's not Chrome. It's literally that simple. They just don't care.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works. How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway. Your username checks out for real.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works.
Uhhhh nope, it takes way less time than it does to simply continue using it. All the time you're using could be spent finding and switching to something else. It literally only takes a few minutes. Way more than people are actually spending on these other platforms. And if they're spending time on these platforms, they can't possibly avoid learning about competing platforms.
How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway.
How an individual chooses to use their time is none of my concern. How millions of people choose to use their time directly impacts everyone else, myself included, so yes it abso-fucking-lutely is my business.
we can stop assuming people are dumb and accept that as you said people don't care nearly enough to stop using it
You realize all of that old shit is still possible today right? Static plain html still works. It loads quicker than ever. The only thing preventing it is the creators of the content. The masses on social media were never going to create that so having Twitter around doesn't change the possibilities. Get cracking.
The Fediverse is there, now.
I use Lemmy and Mastodon, on a daily basis.
I interpreted "we" as the general public. And yes, that was kind of my point. ActivityPub exists. NOSTR exists. Probably a dozen other decentralized social media protocols and services. And yet no one leaves the garbage-ass, bot-riddled, insanely-popular social platforms.
then why are you even here?
Sorry I don't understand the question?
why bother to respond to the comment if all you have to say is "all is lost"?
...why bother to respond to my comment? Why does anyone write comments? We're all here for discussion.
Nothing about what you wrote was a discussion, you stated for a fact that we would not do anything about it
No we can't. It's been consolidated. Sure some of us might get a little piece of freedom but the web is going to stay consolidated unless something major happens..
then give up and go away, or watch the video and reflect on your comment
The internet was better when it was Usenet and Gopher.
The internet was better when it was a pair of tin cans and a string.
Oh sure, like that was an improvement over cave painting.
There have been examples that are effectively primitive shitposts found carved into walls in Pompeii. People never really change.
Forget shitposts, there were legitimate flame wars in Pompeii graffiti:
Successus textor amat coponiaes ancilla(m)
nomine Hiredem quae quidem illum
non curat sed ille rogat illa com(m)iseretur
scribit rivalis vale
Translates to:
Successus the weaver is in love with the slave of the
Innkeeper, whose name is Iris. She doesn't care about
him at all, but he asks that she take pity on him.
A rival wrote this
A response to this translates to:[6]
You're so jealous you're bursting. Don't tear down
someone more handsome―
a guy who could beat you up and who is good-looking.
Cave paintings are overrated. Hand shadow puppets on the cave walls were always more dynamic.
Wi-Fi back then was using carrier pigeons.
Honestly, the internet was at its best when it was the fever dream of stoned, sexually frustrated grad students at Berkley. Infinite potential - it could've been anything. Could've. But wouldn't. The real thing, after it became fully saturated in everyday American life, was always going to be some mediocre, watered down corporate cesspool of lowest common denominator, hyper-sanitized garbage. Because that's what people like. They like safe, familiar, predictable, and uncomplicated. Well, most people.
Yup. It definitely feels like over time the human element of the Internet has been replaced by a corporate one. The most blatant example I can think of is youtube. Nowadays it's so obvious rigged in the favour of already established media and a select few content creators.
Yeah I'm feeling less like a participant, and more like a consumer on the "greater internet" (five big), compared to the early days when corporate presence was minimal, and not remotely slick or subtle. It was like dorky and obvious, and didn't seem remotely like a threat.
Feeling like a consumer is a great way to put it. It especially feels more and more like it when trying to do even the most mundane tasks. Like if you own a product but need to ask a question on Google about it, first you have to scroll past the links to pages trying to sell you the product you typed in, then you might get some reddit links, 2-3 from a smaller forum, and then more links trying to sell you the product. It will say there's thousands of results, but it's just the same 6 links to purchase the product over and over again. So now even basic web searches are mainly for buying stuff.
Search is broken. It's been getting worse year over year and Google / Bing and all the various offshoots that are JUST GOOGLE AND BING (this isn't a fucking secret, people. You can slap whatever algo you want over Google / bing and it's still fucking Google and bing. And a jolly go duck duck fucK yourself to the lot of them).
I pay $10/month for kagi. Its worth it.
I've been using SearX for about a week, and so far it's pretty decent.
Link to kagi? Or are you going to make us Google it?
Kagi.com
Sounds interesting. I'll check it out. BTW I like how unhinged your comment is - you sound like a fun person who I wish I knew IRL
I can't tell if you forgot to add a "/s" to the end of your comment or not.
I was being genuine. I appreciate their passion
And then now that Alphabet owns YouTube, the first couple results are always monetized videos... It's brutal.
Anywhere there is money there are charlatans
I miss the day when you could search YouTube for something like "JFK skyclub" and actually get video of the Skyclub at JFK. Today you'll get 15-minute videos that are 90% a guy talking about his thoughts on JFK, or Skyclub, or airlines, or whatever. If you're really lucky, some of them may feature a few seconds of actual footage of Skyclub.
It's not just Skyclub or travel videos. If I search for "repair mr coffee" I want to see a howto, not someone's SEO-optimized long winded lecture about whatever coffeemakers they're selling.
So the weird thing is you can still do this but only if YouTube thinks you're the right audience for it. My grandfather looks up all kinds of old things on YouTube and almost always get exactly what he wants on the first hit. However if I do it it ends up more like your example. Interesting and annoying at the same time
Sounds like it would actually make sense to have a handful of different accounts, each account optimized (through search/watch history or something) for a specific type of content you want to search for.
Otherwise, 3rd-party search engines are often better than YouTubes own search for finding obscure/rare/unpopular/unlisted/demonetized videos.
"Don't forget to hit the bell and smash that like and subscribe button!"
Yes but it is also way bigger then it was. The amount of data that YouTube has now is just insane. I wonder when they'll start culling old videos.
I think they already began removing old, inactive channels some time ago...
Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
But do paywalls actually encourage people to pay? I would point out that NPR/PBS and The Guardian are at least partially funded by the people but still offer news for free and it seems to work.
NPR is funded by underwriters, donors, government grants, and licensing their content to affiliate stations. It’s actually really interesting to see how they’ve cobbled it together. So yeah it’s free for you and me but a lot of money is actually flowing back and forth.
Point being there are a lot of ways to fund things!
My point is they don't have to rely on paywalls. And I don't know about The Guardian, but NPR isn't trying to make a profit, which is probably part of it. Anyway, I use it for a lot of my news. It's not wholly impartial, but it tries a lot harder than most American news outlets.
I’m just saying there are a lot of ways to make it work!
Regulation would be a better way to improve the quality of journalism, IMO.
I think that would be opening a pretty nasty can of worms. I don't trust any ruling power to decide what "quality" means for the press.
Not really opening up anything. For instance, BBC news is regulated and a lot more reliable and factual than anything in the US. And the US had minimal regulations which were removed in the late 80s and others removed in the 90s. That's why the quality of journalism in the corporate-controlled world has crumbled in my lifetime.
Or another way to put it: the ruling party DOES regulate the news in America, but the ruling party is the wealthy folks who own the news. There is almost no worse system than "funding" the news to get quality.
Fair point. I don't mean to suggest that authors don't deserve to be paid for their work. And while the article discusses Google and Amazon's attempts to manipulate online behavior to drive up their profits, I remember a time when paywalls were a rare exception rather than the rule while reading articles online.
That's because there was a time when everyone had print subscriptions that were healthy, and the internet just gave them extra money for ads. When you start losing subscribers because everyone is looking at your shit online for free, you learn you need to charge for it.
Is anyone actually paying for it though?
Don't get me wrong, actual journalists deserve a great wage. I just haven't seen much of it worth paying for in recent years. Real journalists get locked up and it looks like the rest took that threat very seriously. I'm not going to pay money to read corporate puff pieces and controlled opposition.
The Atlantic often does long, in-depth stories and has proven to be a very reliable source. Their journalists have proven themselves in getting some great sources. Just in the last couple of weeks admissions by John Kelley and Gen Milley have proven stories The Atlantic broke 2 years ago with anonymous sources were accurate and credible.
The Atlantic is a pretty reputable source. And I think there's a difference between subscribing to news for news reporting like the New York Times, The Guardian, etc, vs subscribing to magazine like the Atlantic, New Yorker, or New Republic that will give you more political commentary and analysis. Both have a role to play and both need subscribers. I subscribe to the Atlantic on and off (I've kind of rotated between the atlantic, new republic, and the nation over time). Primary subscriptions for my household are the New York Times and New Yorker. Then I have my annual membership/donations for NPR and PBS. Gotta support the news and good political commentary. It's holiday season soon. Subscriptions make good holiday gifts.
Simple, capitalism found a new promised land. The next space to fill up. And manifest destiny within.
Unfortunately but fortunately as well, it's an infinite space.
Early money has built large infrastructure within it. It's been built over time and now is so massive it's hard to comprehend in the real world. It's nearly impossible to compete with them other than them tearing themselves down, but the space is still nearly infinitely large and competitors can still rise in the fringe and who knows after decades maybe rise to the same kinda massive company
So now we must limit the infinite. Cull all of it to the finite they can control. The virtual world is real, the metaverse is already upon us, and unfortunately it's already starting to look like the late capitalism asphalt shopping plazas.
So it's worse cause it's built for the investors and being limited for them too. It's why people beg for the next BIG thing, so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space.
so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space.
Pretty sure that Meta was meant to be the next big market space.
I think Zuckerberg was expecting all of us to sit in a chair with VR headsets on all day and buy buy buy.
I personally feel like it's a total invasion of my privacy because it learns "me" and then tries to influence my every move a lot more intimately than cookies in a browser does.
100% absolute control over your life to sell you as much as possible..
And people consider that a utopia and not a problem
It also shows how detached some of these billionaires really are. A VR system is not yet affordable for the majority of Americans, and the technology has much more development to do before it's as widespread as video game consoles, never mind PCs.
Yah don't see a small player coming around anytime soon. People don't realise how uterlu massive these tech companies are.
Yeah no. Not a chance we see valid competitors until cracks really start forming in the services these monopolies can offer. It's gotta get worse before there can be competition and so they can t just buy them and aquire it to break immediately. I mean we can see some monopolies having their fun ruined look at Twitter; but Facebook, Amazon and Google have money in reserve and an ad system (or AWS) that pays all the bills still.
But yeah people don't comprehend that these massive online companies are all the Nestle of their space and people can't even comprehend what being the Nestle of Nestle is, and the power they wield.
The virtual world is real, the metaverse is already upon us, and unfortunately it’s already starting to look like the late capitalism asphalt shopping plazas.
Trust corporations to ruin something people enjoy.
Its time to 'AT&T' Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
Funny, but this isn't the best example. The Atlantic has been a subscription magazine for coming on 200 years now. It's also one of the few places you can get non click bait articles without ads.
Tell me no one actually needed to be told that. Please. For my sanity.
Please tell me no one thinks that evidence < anecdotes? Please, for my sanity...
The sad state of knowledge & logic aside:
There is SIGNIFICANT value to proving something we all think is true. This means action can be taken, it can be cited in argument, and is actually credible as opposed to a "feeling" that's it's worse.
Sure, we "know" it's worse. I've experienced search results getting worse and worse for what seems like nearly 10 years now. But I have no proof of this, as such it's an anecdote.
Or disabling js. Most of you use ublock origin. Ublock has a setting to disable JavaScript and you can whitelist sites you want js
Disabling js does not bypass these article limits, idk why this is being upvoted.
On some websites it does. For example, it's worked for me on newyorktimes
True, but that's yet another step every time I want to read an article. Personally i just use ublock origin and add this custom filter list.
And yeah, you can also turn off JS to accomplish a lot while browsing the internet.
They're not asking to get around it, they're pointing out shitty practices that are common now.
People don't want to pay, but they also don't want to see ads. How does everyone think these companies are going to afford to operate?
Ad revenue. Doesn't matter if people don't like to see them lol
I thought this was the joke
Good old atlantic coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons.
I would get off google if I were you
I strangely feel very conflicted over Google. I have a Pixel phone which supports the security hardened GrapheneOS.
Were it not for Google allowing their phones to be so easily rooted, I'd probably be with Apple, who have their own egregious privacy invading practices.
Google also left rss feeds available on Youtube, which essentially allowed me to easily move my subscriptions to my rss feeder instead of outright subscribing. Then, thanks to Invidious, I just use an extension to reroute any time I visit that channel/video.
Grant you, Google could easily remove these features that strangely enough allow for easy migration away from their platform, and I can definitely see a future where they do just that.
It just is such a strange thing for a company to have these built in aspects to their products that literally allow you to migrate away from their platform.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this gives Google some sort of pass to do as they please. I haven't used Google search regularly in a very long time. I still use their email and calendar solely because my current job team uses it as one of their main scheduling tools, but would prefer if we used something like a NextCloud instance.
In short, I have done some things to get away from Google's suite of software and will continue to do so, but these strange loopholes, especially the interesting relationship Pixel/GrapheneOS has, make me wonder about how Google could still make certain products and remain a smaller, much more regulated, part of the Internet as a whole...
The amount of people who would do that, like you, me and possibly most of the Lemmy users, are so small that the good PR is worth it. Guaranteed, if there's a mass exodus those options will disappear.
Chrome browser is cancer, but also this has nothing to do with Google.
I believe what you meant to write is "The internet IS worse"
Well... you gotta hand it to them, that's a succinct summary.
Capitalism does not work well when companies are too big. No one can compete unless you are already very rich. That sucks.
If people are actually acknowledging this maybe we could do something about it.
Google should have been (should be?) nationalized. Or maybe stick it under the USPS. (If only people weren't constantly trying to kill the USPS...)
This is an interesting idea! I've never heard something like this suggested before.
The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon is actually insane. It’s like they have a cheat code for printing money. Google is definitely just as bad, worse even as they control much of the internet, right down to the architecture.
Internet was better when it was a bunch of forums and personal web pages
We can get it back, and the antitrust trials are a big part of actually doing it
https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz\_4?si=fQc-lIFzT-0hoeNv
Sure we can but will we? No.
Twitter has only lost ~10% of it's userbase after repeatedly abusing its own users. Reddit probably less. After everything we've learned about Meta, tens of millions of people signed up on day 1 to join their new service, Threads. Google Chrome still has like 80% market share.
Changing is honestly a trivial ask, but we won't, because no one cares.
It's not that no one cares, per se. We just live in a society where the majority of working adults are fucking exhausted. They have bills to pay, uncertain job security, seemingly constant climate crises/natural disasters in many geolocations (e.g. Canada and US West Coast wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), hyper polarized partisanship in many countries (yeah, it isn't unique to the US), and on and on. That Google, Microsoft, or Amazon own the internet is such a low priority to the much more immediate, life threatening/living security concerns of the majority of people.
I care, but I also understand why many people do not.
Man, I would love to run a Linux box and still be able to run the like 4 programs I use my computer for, but I don't have any interest in running an OS I have to build and make work. I got Redhat working once (feels like a million years ago) and I am just not that interested in my PC anymore. It's a tool. I want it to work without any fiddling on my part. It has exactly 5 programs it ever has to run. I touch it on the weekends. Windows it is.
This is me agreeing with you in every way.
Fwiw Linux is way easier today than it was a million years ago. Honestly I find it simpler to use than Windows.
It might be, but it still adds steps that I no longer have the patience for.
Try it, Linux Mint just works put of the box, easy as hell. Even has GUIs for everything.
LOL that makes zero sense. It takes 5 minutes to switch to a different browser or service. If they were tired or didn't have time, they wouldn't be spending it on Twitter and Reddit.
It's not really the time. It's more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.
Sure, it's easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it's there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.
Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.
The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.
This just sounds like a bunch of non-sense, making up excuses for people making poor decisions. Like you can't blame every bad decision on "wahhhh life is hard!"
No, it's not excuses, it's just reality. It's hard. Does that mean people shouldn't try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.
The thing is, just because people aren't doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn't mean that they aren't in other areas that you may not know about.
For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn't leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that's ok.
Just be the best human you can be every day and don't beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.
It's not hard. It isn't. Not even a little.
No one is talking about "supporting" FOSS. We're talking about using less exploitative software and services.
Spend 3 seconds Googling and install and use anything that's not Chrome. It's literally that simple. They just don't care.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works. How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway. Your username checks out for real.
Uhhhh nope, it takes way less time than it does to simply continue using it. All the time you're using could be spent finding and switching to something else. It literally only takes a few minutes. Way more than people are actually spending on these other platforms. And if they're spending time on these platforms, they can't possibly avoid learning about competing platforms.
How an individual chooses to use their time is none of my concern. How millions of people choose to use their time directly impacts everyone else, myself included, so yes it abso-fucking-lutely is my business.
we can stop assuming people are dumb and accept that as you said people don't care nearly enough to stop using it
You realize all of that old shit is still possible today right? Static plain html still works. It loads quicker than ever. The only thing preventing it is the creators of the content. The masses on social media were never going to create that so having Twitter around doesn't change the possibilities. Get cracking.
The Fediverse is there, now.
I use Lemmy and Mastodon, on a daily basis.
I interpreted "we" as the general public. And yes, that was kind of my point. ActivityPub exists. NOSTR exists. Probably a dozen other decentralized social media protocols and services. And yet no one leaves the garbage-ass, bot-riddled, insanely-popular social platforms.
then why are you even here?
Sorry I don't understand the question?
why bother to respond to the comment if all you have to say is "all is lost"?
...why bother to respond to my comment? Why does anyone write comments? We're all here for discussion.
Nothing about what you wrote was a discussion, you stated for a fact that we would not do anything about it
That's incorrect
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rimtaSgGz_4?si=fQc-lIFzT-0hoeNv
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
No we can't. It's been consolidated. Sure some of us might get a little piece of freedom but the web is going to stay consolidated unless something major happens..
then give up and go away, or watch the video and reflect on your comment
The internet was better when it was Usenet and Gopher.
The internet was better when it was a pair of tin cans and a string.
Oh sure, like that was an improvement over cave painting.
There have been examples that are effectively primitive shitposts found carved into walls in Pompeii. People never really change.
Forget shitposts, there were legitimate flame wars in Pompeii graffiti:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_graffiti
I definitely preferred oral history.
Cave paintings are overrated. Hand shadow puppets on the cave walls were always more dynamic.
Wi-Fi back then was using carrier pigeons.
Honestly, the internet was at its best when it was the fever dream of stoned, sexually frustrated grad students at Berkley. Infinite potential - it could've been anything. Could've. But wouldn't. The real thing, after it became fully saturated in everyday American life, was always going to be some mediocre, watered down corporate cesspool of lowest common denominator, hyper-sanitized garbage. Because that's what people like. They like safe, familiar, predictable, and uncomplicated. Well, most people.
Yup. It definitely feels like over time the human element of the Internet has been replaced by a corporate one. The most blatant example I can think of is youtube. Nowadays it's so obvious rigged in the favour of already established media and a select few content creators.
Yeah I'm feeling less like a participant, and more like a consumer on the "greater internet" (five big), compared to the early days when corporate presence was minimal, and not remotely slick or subtle. It was like dorky and obvious, and didn't seem remotely like a threat.
Feeling like a consumer is a great way to put it. It especially feels more and more like it when trying to do even the most mundane tasks. Like if you own a product but need to ask a question on Google about it, first you have to scroll past the links to pages trying to sell you the product you typed in, then you might get some reddit links, 2-3 from a smaller forum, and then more links trying to sell you the product. It will say there's thousands of results, but it's just the same 6 links to purchase the product over and over again. So now even basic web searches are mainly for buying stuff.
Search is broken. It's been getting worse year over year and Google / Bing and all the various offshoots that are JUST GOOGLE AND BING (this isn't a fucking secret, people. You can slap whatever algo you want over Google / bing and it's still fucking Google and bing. And a jolly go duck duck fucK yourself to the lot of them).
I pay $10/month for kagi. Its worth it.
I've been using SearX for about a week, and so far it's pretty decent.
Link to kagi? Or are you going to make us Google it?
Kagi.com
Sounds interesting. I'll check it out. BTW I like how unhinged your comment is - you sound like a fun person who I wish I knew IRL
I can't tell if you forgot to add a "/s" to the end of your comment or not.
I was being genuine. I appreciate their passion
And then now that Alphabet owns YouTube, the first couple results are always monetized videos... It's brutal.
Anywhere there is money there are charlatans
I miss the day when you could search YouTube for something like "JFK skyclub" and actually get video of the Skyclub at JFK. Today you'll get 15-minute videos that are 90% a guy talking about his thoughts on JFK, or Skyclub, or airlines, or whatever. If you're really lucky, some of them may feature a few seconds of actual footage of Skyclub.
It's not just Skyclub or travel videos. If I search for "repair mr coffee" I want to see a howto, not someone's SEO-optimized long winded lecture about whatever coffeemakers they're selling.
So the weird thing is you can still do this but only if YouTube thinks you're the right audience for it. My grandfather looks up all kinds of old things on YouTube and almost always get exactly what he wants on the first hit. However if I do it it ends up more like your example. Interesting and annoying at the same time
Sounds like it would actually make sense to have a handful of different accounts, each account optimized (through search/watch history or something) for a specific type of content you want to search for.
Otherwise, 3rd-party search engines are often better than YouTubes own search for finding obscure/rare/unpopular/unlisted/demonetized videos.
"Don't forget to hit the bell and smash that like and subscribe button!"
Yes but it is also way bigger then it was. The amount of data that YouTube has now is just insane. I wonder when they'll start culling old videos.
I think they already began removing old, inactive channels some time ago...
Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
But do paywalls actually encourage people to pay? I would point out that NPR/PBS and The Guardian are at least partially funded by the people but still offer news for free and it seems to work.
NPR is funded by underwriters, donors, government grants, and licensing their content to affiliate stations. It’s actually really interesting to see how they’ve cobbled it together. So yeah it’s free for you and me but a lot of money is actually flowing back and forth.
Point being there are a lot of ways to fund things!
My point is they don't have to rely on paywalls. And I don't know about The Guardian, but NPR isn't trying to make a profit, which is probably part of it. Anyway, I use it for a lot of my news. It's not wholly impartial, but it tries a lot harder than most American news outlets.
I’m just saying there are a lot of ways to make it work!
Regulation would be a better way to improve the quality of journalism, IMO.
I think that would be opening a pretty nasty can of worms. I don't trust any ruling power to decide what "quality" means for the press.
Not really opening up anything. For instance, BBC news is regulated and a lot more reliable and factual than anything in the US. And the US had minimal regulations which were removed in the late 80s and others removed in the 90s. That's why the quality of journalism in the corporate-controlled world has crumbled in my lifetime.
Or another way to put it: the ruling party DOES regulate the news in America, but the ruling party is the wealthy folks who own the news. There is almost no worse system than "funding" the news to get quality.
Fair point. I don't mean to suggest that authors don't deserve to be paid for their work. And while the article discusses Google and Amazon's attempts to manipulate online behavior to drive up their profits, I remember a time when paywalls were a rare exception rather than the rule while reading articles online.
That's because there was a time when everyone had print subscriptions that were healthy, and the internet just gave them extra money for ads. When you start losing subscribers because everyone is looking at your shit online for free, you learn you need to charge for it.
Is anyone actually paying for it though?
Don't get me wrong, actual journalists deserve a great wage. I just haven't seen much of it worth paying for in recent years. Real journalists get locked up and it looks like the rest took that threat very seriously. I'm not going to pay money to read corporate puff pieces and controlled opposition.
The Atlantic often does long, in-depth stories and has proven to be a very reliable source. Their journalists have proven themselves in getting some great sources. Just in the last couple of weeks admissions by John Kelley and Gen Milley have proven stories The Atlantic broke 2 years ago with anonymous sources were accurate and credible.
The Atlantic is a pretty reputable source. And I think there's a difference between subscribing to news for news reporting like the New York Times, The Guardian, etc, vs subscribing to magazine like the Atlantic, New Yorker, or New Republic that will give you more political commentary and analysis. Both have a role to play and both need subscribers. I subscribe to the Atlantic on and off (I've kind of rotated between the atlantic, new republic, and the nation over time). Primary subscriptions for my household are the New York Times and New Yorker. Then I have my annual membership/donations for NPR and PBS. Gotta support the news and good political commentary. It's holiday season soon. Subscriptions make good holiday gifts.
Worse than it had been previously.
Oh the irony
It's called enshittification.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
enshittification
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Dead on.
Simple, capitalism found a new promised land. The next space to fill up. And manifest destiny within.
Unfortunately but fortunately as well, it's an infinite space. Early money has built large infrastructure within it. It's been built over time and now is so massive it's hard to comprehend in the real world. It's nearly impossible to compete with them other than them tearing themselves down, but the space is still nearly infinitely large and competitors can still rise in the fringe and who knows after decades maybe rise to the same kinda massive company
So now we must limit the infinite. Cull all of it to the finite they can control. The virtual world is real, the metaverse is already upon us, and unfortunately it's already starting to look like the late capitalism asphalt shopping plazas.
So it's worse cause it's built for the investors and being limited for them too. It's why people beg for the next BIG thing, so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space.
I think Zuckerberg was expecting all of us to sit in a chair with VR headsets on all day and buy buy buy.
I personally feel like it's a total invasion of my privacy because it learns "me" and then tries to influence my every move a lot more intimately than cookies in a browser does.
100% absolute control over your life to sell you as much as possible.. And people consider that a utopia and not a problem
It also shows how detached some of these billionaires really are. A VR system is not yet affordable for the majority of Americans, and the technology has much more development to do before it's as widespread as video game consoles, never mind PCs.
Yah don't see a small player coming around anytime soon. People don't realise how uterlu massive these tech companies are.
Yeah no. Not a chance we see valid competitors until cracks really start forming in the services these monopolies can offer. It's gotta get worse before there can be competition and so they can t just buy them and aquire it to break immediately. I mean we can see some monopolies having their fun ruined look at Twitter; but Facebook, Amazon and Google have money in reserve and an ad system (or AWS) that pays all the bills still.
But yeah people don't comprehend that these massive online companies are all the Nestle of their space and people can't even comprehend what being the Nestle of Nestle is, and the power they wield.
Poetry
Trust corporations to ruin something people enjoy.
Its time to 'AT&T' Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
Funny, but this isn't the best example. The Atlantic has been a subscription magazine for coming on 200 years now. It's also one of the few places you can get non click bait articles without ads.
Tell me no one actually needed to be told that. Please. For my sanity.
Please tell me no one thinks that evidence < anecdotes? Please, for my sanity...
The sad state of knowledge & logic aside:
There is SIGNIFICANT value to proving something we all think is true. This means action can be taken, it can be cited in argument, and is actually credible as opposed to a "feeling" that's it's worse.
Sure, we "know" it's worse. I've experienced search results getting worse and worse for what seems like nearly 10 years now. But I have no proof of this, as such it's an anecdote.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2023%2F10%2Fbig-tech-algorithmic-influence-antitrust-litigation%2F675575%2F
12ft.io is your friend
Or disabling js. Most of you use ublock origin. Ublock has a setting to disable JavaScript and you can whitelist sites you want js
Disabling js does not bypass these article limits, idk why this is being upvoted.
On some websites it does. For example, it's worked for me on newyorktimes
True, but that's yet another step every time I want to read an article. Personally i just use ublock origin and add this custom filter list.
And yeah, you can also turn off JS to accomplish a lot while browsing the internet.
They're not asking to get around it, they're pointing out shitty practices that are common now.
People don't want to pay, but they also don't want to see ads. How does everyone think these companies are going to afford to operate?
Ad revenue. Doesn't matter if people don't like to see them lol
I thought this was the joke
Good old atlantic coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons.
I would get off google if I were you
I strangely feel very conflicted over Google. I have a Pixel phone which supports the security hardened GrapheneOS.
Were it not for Google allowing their phones to be so easily rooted, I'd probably be with Apple, who have their own egregious privacy invading practices.
Google also left rss feeds available on Youtube, which essentially allowed me to easily move my subscriptions to my rss feeder instead of outright subscribing. Then, thanks to Invidious, I just use an extension to reroute any time I visit that channel/video.
Grant you, Google could easily remove these features that strangely enough allow for easy migration away from their platform, and I can definitely see a future where they do just that.
It just is such a strange thing for a company to have these built in aspects to their products that literally allow you to migrate away from their platform.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this gives Google some sort of pass to do as they please. I haven't used Google search regularly in a very long time. I still use their email and calendar solely because my current job team uses it as one of their main scheduling tools, but would prefer if we used something like a NextCloud instance.
In short, I have done some things to get away from Google's suite of software and will continue to do so, but these strange loopholes, especially the interesting relationship Pixel/GrapheneOS has, make me wonder about how Google could still make certain products and remain a smaller, much more regulated, part of the Internet as a whole...
The amount of people who would do that, like you, me and possibly most of the Lemmy users, are so small that the good PR is worth it. Guaranteed, if there's a mass exodus those options will disappear.
Chrome browser is cancer, but also this has nothing to do with Google.
I believe what you meant to write is "The internet IS worse"
Well... you gotta hand it to them, that's a succinct summary.
Capitalism does not work well when companies are too big. No one can compete unless you are already very rich. That sucks.
If people are actually acknowledging this maybe we could do something about it.
Google should have been (should be?) nationalized. Or maybe stick it under the USPS. (If only people weren't constantly trying to kill the USPS...)
This is an interesting idea! I've never heard something like this suggested before.
The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon is actually insane. It’s like they have a cheat code for printing money. Google is definitely just as bad, worse even as they control much of the internet, right down to the architecture.
/c/mildlyalarming
Actor de metodo
God forbid you pay someone.