Given that Google's been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays...
Nope, I'm not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.
It's more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits. That's more than enough info to assume they're going to go to war in the near future (now) with them.
They’ve always been at war with ad blockers. It’s just most major multinationals have matured or diversified to a point where they are functional monopolies, and no longer gain any value in competition or service improvement.
At this stage of the merger and consolidation phase of global capitalism, with captured governments that won’t dare break them up or fine them more than a meek virtue signal, the most cost effective way to satiate the infinite growth of capitalism is to increase the exploitation and value extraction of their existing user base as much as possible (aka enshittification).
Just for clarity, they already switched protocols (Manifest v3), they just have continued to support the old format (v2) that allows unlock origin to work. They are discontinuing support for v2 next year.
When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.
However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called "adblock users" instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.
That's because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they're super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; HLK-AL00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.102 Mobile Safari/537.36 EdgA/104.0.1293.70
And finally;
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3; Trident/6.0)
Now, that last one is making it look like I'm using internet explorer... Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.
I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with “fancy” features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.
Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it’s absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like “See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn’t bother to support it anymore”.
I don’t know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don’t have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
Chrome users who use an adblocker don’t get the issue
Firefox users who do not use an adblocker get the issue
FIrefox users who use an adblocker, but change User Agent to Chrome, don’t get the issue
I am a Firefox user who uses adblock and I don't get the issue.
Supposedly Firefox users spoofing the Chrome user agent don’t get the issue because the script tries to execute the 5s delay in a way that works on Chrome but not on FF. Because the Chrome method doesn’t work on FF, it just gets skipped entirely. But I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, just read about it.
My understanding is the method they can use on chrome is near instant, but the alternative they use on Firefox is slower, hence the delay. Is this BS? Yeah probably, but it does at least logically follow.
I know several websites consider firefox's built-in privacy settings an adblocker in certain configurations. I get notices on many sites and use no adblocker. Not sure if it's the case here.
But they aren't controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma' bell and pa' bell days.
But they aren’t controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma’ bell and pa’ bell days.
Google controls over 90% of the search business in the US and that’s the way the vast majority of people begin their browsing. It’s why US v Google is currently in the courts
MS vs US back in the 90’s did not result in anything significant. This pretty much will happen again with Google. Some lobbyists will just do their thing, some minor slaps in the wrist and concessments between DoJ and Alohabet etc and Google will continue to Googling around.
I’m not trying to argue there’s appetite to break up Google among the people with the power to do it. I’m just arguing Google has a monopoly similar to Ma Bell.
We learned something about how LLMs work with this… its like a bunch of paintings were chopped up into pixels to use to make other paintings. No one knew it was possible to break the model and have it spit out the pixels of a single painting in order.
I wonder if diffusion models have some other wierd querks we have yet to discover
The technology of compression a diffusion model would have to achieve to realistically (not too lossily) store “the training data” would be more valuable than the entirety of the machine learning field right now.
I’m not an expert, but I would say that it is going to be less likely for a diffusion model to spit out training data in a completely intact way. The way that LLMs versus diffusion models work are very different.
LLMs work by predicting the next statistically likely token, they take all of the previous text, then predict what the next token will be based on that. So, if you can trick it into a state where the next subsequent tokens are something verbatim from training data, then that’s what you get.
Diffusion models work by taking a randomly generated latent, combining it with the CLIP interpretation of the user’s prompt, then trying to turn the randomly generated information into a new latent which the VAE will then decode into something a human can see, because the latents the model is dealing with are meaningless numbers to humans.
In other words, there’s a lot more randomness to deal with in a diffusion model. You could probably get a specific source image back if you specially crafted a latent and a prompt, which one guy did do by basically running img2img on a specific image that was in the training set and giving it a prompt to spit the same image out again. But that required having the original image in the first place, so it’s not really a weakness in the same way this was for GPT.
But the fact is the LLM was able to spit out the training data. This means that anything in the training data isn’t just copied into the training dataset, allegedly under fair use as research, but also copied into the LLM as part of an active commercial product. Sure, the LLM might break it down and store the components separately, but if an LLM can reassemble it and spit out the original copyrighted work then how is that different from how a photocopier breaks down the image scanned from a piece of paper then reassembles it into instructions for its printer?
But the thing is the law has already established this with people and their memories. You might genuinely not realise you’re plagiarising, but what matters is the similarity of the work produced.
ChatGPT has copied the data into its training database, then trained off that database, then it runs “independently” of that database - which is how they vaguely argue fair use under the research exemption.
However if ChatGPT can “remember” its training data and recompile significant portions of it in certain circumstances, then it must be guilty of plagiarism and copyright infringement.
Speaking for LLMs, given that they operate on a next-token basis, there will be some statistical likelihood of spitting out original training data that can’t be avoided. The normal counter-argument being that in theory, the odds of a particular piece of training data coming back out intact for more than a handful of words should be extremely low.
Of course, in this case, Google’s researchers took advantage of the repeat discouragement mechanism to make that unlikelihood occur reliably, showing that there are indeed flaws to make it happen.
If a person studies a text then writes an article about the same subject as that text while using the same wording and discussing the same points, then it’s plagiarism whether or not they made an exact copy. Surely it should also be the case with LLM’s, which train on the data then inadvertently replicate the data again? The law has already established that it doesn’t matter what the process is for making the new work, what matters is how close it is to the original work.
IIRC based on the source paper the “verbatim” text is common stuff like legal boilerplate, shared code snippets, book jacket blurbs, alphabetical lists of countries, and other text repeated countless times across the web. It’s the text equivalent of DALL-E “memorizing” a meme template or a stock image – it doesn’t mean all or even most of the training data is stored within the model, just that certain pieces of highly duplicated data have ascended to the level of concept and can be reproduced under unusual circumstances.
They claim it’s not stored in the LLM, they admit to storing it in the training database but argue fair use under the research exemption.
This almost makes it seems like the LLM can tap into the training database when it reaches some kind of limit. In which case the training database absolutely should not have a fair use exemption - it’s not just research, but a part of the finished commercial product.
Did you read the article? The verbatim text is, in one example, including email addresses and names (and legal boilerplate) directly from asbestoslaw.com.
These models can reach out to the internet to retrieve data and context. It is entirely possible that’s what was happening in this particular case. If I had to guess, this somehow triggered some CI test case which is used to validate this capability.
Welcome to the wild West of American data privacy laws. Companies do whatever the fuck they want with whatever data they can beg borrow or steal and then lie about it when regulators come calling.
Sheriff Robert Norris is speaking into his body camera. “Today’s date is April 20, approximately 7 a.m. Just want to document my visit to the Hayden Library. My attorney and I are just curious and would like to document this visit to see what kind of materials are on display here.”
Norris, the sheriff of Kootenai County, Idaho, meets up outside the library with Marianna Cochran, the founder of CleanBooks4Kids, a “grassroots group of North Idaho citizens alarmed at the abundance of books sexualizing, grooming, and indoctrinating kids in our local libraries at taxpayer expense,” to search for the book Identical, which Norris says he had “seen an image [of] floating on social media.”
So it’s a fishing expedition with some random right wing nutjob in tow, huh?
ACAB
But neither of those books was actually checked out from the Hayden Library on his trip. One of the books was checked out from another library, and another was stolen off the shelves. Norris refused to return the books at first, and Alexa Eccles, the executive director of the Community Library Network, told me in a phone call that, when Norris eventually returned them, the barcodes had been cut out of the book covers, and the library has not been able to return them to circulation or get new copies.
Does he not know how to use the Dewey decimal system? You don’t have to search for books in a library, you just look them up in the catalog and then go directly to where they’re displayed. Better yet, the library probably has their catalog online.
I wonder if they were taking notes from John Deere and the automotive industry or will it be the reverse here soon?
Just imagine all these vehicles that could be bricked for not going back to the stealerships for outrageous prices on parts and incompetent service.
Also the vehicles that could be disabled for not paying for device protection plan that allows your vehicle to operate safely. It would be a shame if your vehicle stopped working on your way to work or the hospital.
I suspect Tesla, BMW, and John Deere are the closest to this reality.
I sure hope the government doesn’t help with another great cash for clunkers national program to get rid of more cars too old for these measures. Sure is a great way to drive new car sales though…
If the manufacturer can stop your trains, then obviously anyone with the necessary hacking skills can do it too. Certain governments might be very interested in tampering with the logistics of another country.
Oh don’t count GM and a Ford out of it. They’re already kicking android auto and Apple car to the curb so they can control more stuff and get access to more data. The savvier they get the closer that comes to reality.
Of course, by the end of our lives you won’t own a car at all. You’ll subscribe to a car company that will act like a hybrid ride share and rental program. Commutes will be on a rideshare basis and you’ll be able to rent a car for a weekend road trip.
I just heard about GM this morning in my tech news. I didn’t realize that about Ford too.
I’ve drawn a line in the sand with my vehicles at about 2011 for tech. I love tech and I love cars but just not into the current versions of everything being touch screen controls.
Give me knobs for climate controls, gear shifters, and gauges for the rest. They don’t need all of these computer systems that fail or become outdated as soon as they are released like the manufacturer’s nav systems. We also don’t need them to stop working completely because a sensor failed and can only be replaced by the dealer.
My phone in a holder can be the smartest part of the car for me thanks.
I’m glad to hear that. Often I’ve driven rental cars and *last time I struggled to find the gear shifter which was replaced by buttons on the dash.
I’ve also seen just a video of a Tesla only new driver struggle to drive a ICE car because it had a gear shifter and didn’t automatically brake. I’m feeling like a dinosaur now…
I think that it's not unreasonable for game wardens, and other officials who are preventing or investigating poaching to enter privately owned non-curtilage land for that purpose. Otherwise, all privately owned land would be open to poaching with essential impunity, and hunting/fishing laws don't only apply to public land.
A trail camera, however, is not in and of itself evidence of poaching, and officers should have zero rights to interfere with someone else's trail camera in any way. Neither should officers be allowed to set up their own trail cameras on private land (without permission from the property owner). If officers find a trail camera, they should seek to speak with its owner, either by contacting the property owner, or by leaving a business card with the camera and waiting for the owner to contact them (if they so choose).
Taking the camera without probable cause was theft. There is almost always time for a warrant. And if there isn’t, you should still get the warrant BEFORE looking at the camera content. So many other issues to pursue…
From the quoted text it sounded like they did get a warrant to view. I think making a copy so as not to alter or taint the original is standard procedure, if not required, for evidentiary purposes.
It makes almost none of it better (we agree on that). But they actually followed some sort of evidentiary procedure. If we’re to be outraged at incompetence and exceeding authority we should know the rules and hammer where they are explicitly wrong and not make stuff up.
Regardless of whether there is “time,” they should not be able to take private property from a person’s private land without a warrant (or probable cause), any more than if it were in their house or car.
Taking a computer out of somebody’s home office and then getting a warrant to try to look inside is still taking the computer without a warrant. The same should go for these cameras.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Ya I’ll never stop using ad blockers, the internet is essentially unusable without them. Mine still work on youtube but if the day comes that they don’t I’ll just stop using it. We need some competition here, things have gotten increasingly anticonsumer and the companies have gotten too comfortable doing and charging whatever they want
Nebula isn’t too bad, I like a lot of those informative creators and they collaorated and made a startup video hosting site, its essentially everything i want youtube to be. If more creators decided to do this it’s be great.
The problem with any youtube competitor is that there is no way in hell they can cover the costs of the infrastructure required to host the same amount of videos youtube has and streaming them to the millions of users youtube serves daily.
They were big through investors throwing money at a money sink for years. Youtube was losing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a long time, before it finally became profitable.
A new competitor wouldn’t get such favorable support from investors.
Because no one else occupied the same space in a meaningful way.
Low interest rates meant they were able to get massive investments without the burden of profitability.
Now you’d need to distinguish yourself from YouTube in a meaningful way as well as provide a sustainable revenue model, such as advertising, in order to gain access to a similar amount of venture capital.
Youtube had a space devoid of competition. The next guy doesn’t. If the next guy wants to compete, they have to have all the features of Youtube or people will complain. Many of Youtube’s current features cost money and weren’t present when Youtube started.
The space is also more regulated now that Youtube exists, meaning the new guy has to follow regulations which normally costs money. When Youtube started, those regulations didn’t exist, because Youtube didn’t exist.
Youtube got big by building a city in an open field surrounded by nothing but open fields. The next guy has to build a city directly next to Youtube, follow all the same laws as Youtube, and ask you not to drive into Youtube.
I don't think even a decentralized service could hold a mass equal to youtube. That would require that either the owners of all instances pay from their own pockets with mostly no income to support it, or that every user paid up, which is not going to happen, at least not in a service like youtube.
Some of us are data holders and have Gigabit internet with options to go even higher. Don’t count out the little guys ability to share massive amounts of data… been doing it since zip drives and CDs
Let’s say only 500gb of video are uploaded every hour in this hypothetical federated YouTube (actual volume for the site looks to be ~200tb an hour). Are you honestly going to argue just that is even conceivably maintainable? You have to infinitely add storage space, multiple TBs a day.
Let’s say I run my own hypothetical, federated, userpeer-to-peer and opt-in server CDN function-platform, also known as PeerTube…
I’d only accept those video uploads/uploaders I consider quality content.
I’d love to host many content creator’s videos. From the goodness of my heart, for free, as a gift to you all. But certainly not all videos, and nowhere near 200 TB/h. But I can afford to host many TB’s without it impacting my private economy.
That video of some idiot eating tidepods or whatever the current thing is? They could find somebody else that will host. Or if unable, host their own videos. Now we’re both happy.
I think censorship in the Fediverse works because you can always find a host which aligns with your ideology. Bad ideas automatically die out if the overwhelming majority of people stop spreading it, not because a giant megacorp decides it’s not a good message to show to their shareholders.
I’d only accept those video uploads/uploaders I consider quality content.
Cool, I like that idea unironically. So how are you going to do that? To accept only “quality uploads” you would have to somehow know, ahead of time if the uploaded content is acceptable. Sure maybe you have a white list but have fun maintaining that.
Okay so different idea maybe you let people vote on the video somehow and delete videos that are deemed poor quality. Great! So now you burn through writes instead of storage itself which is probably desirable though it only lessens the need for more drives. There’s a flaw in this system though. How do you prevent a community from removing a video that’s been voted to be poor quality (IE fake “bad” reviews)? Are these videos gonna be manually reviewed? Manually reviewing would have the same immense maintenance problems as a whitelist so again have fun maintaining that.
And who pays the creators? They are usually partly or mostly ad supported. At best they have a patreon/floatplane or other support platform.
They will simply not come over since there’s no audience. No audience, no creator. No creator, no audience.
Just like nobody would leave reddit for Lemmy since all the content is on reddit?
To be honest, I miss the times when people made videos because they wanted to make videos, not make money. I’m willing to forego quite a lot of YouTube content if that helps build a new paradigm for how the internet works. Would you?
Let’s get real, most of the people stayed on reddit. Only a very small fraction tried lemmy and an even smaller fraction have completely stopped using reddit.
That’s OK, I stopped using reddit completely almost a decade ago. I’m happier with a small group of nice people than with a large group of unpleasant people.
A lot of people seen to focus on profitability and maximum exposure as the goal. More and more people don’t think like that anymore.
Wow can’t believe you’re being down voted on this, guess it shows a lot of people don’t understand that it’s the foodcarts that lead to a good restaurant scene. The hobbiests that provide valuable content(that is later repackaged and sold as a product by leachers large and small).
There are some legitimate ideas to work through as far as a decentralized video hosting platform but the idea that something would be lost by every fucking nitwit looking to “make money on ads” not having a central video source foist their content on you…uhhh I’m down with that for sure.
When stuff is done for passion and interest, it’s almost always better than a paid product or service, and if you haven’t learned that yet in life you’re making me feel old.
The beauty of the fediverse is that “if you don’t like it, make your own” actually works.
I don’t like down votes as they’re abused as a tool to suppress “unwanted” opinions. So the instance I’m on simply don’t accept downvotes… This ride only goes up.
Thanks for your support though, people on “hate filled” (😉) instances might find some of my opinions interesting but might not see them due to the group think downvotes.
Uploaders would be manually screened at sign-up, I wouldn’t run an open server. Many fediverse servers in general and several PT-instances in particular does it. It works fine for a community based platform. It’s not meant to be one, monolithic server doing it all, open for all.
There are many ways to handle storage requirements, I like datacenters with easily expandable storage.
You bring up “have fun with that” but I’m having great fun already helping out running both a Mastodon and Lemmy instance. I don’t see how a video hosting service would be much different, in regards to moderation. Maybe I’m missing part of your point?
My moderation point is that with a video service you are forced to “watch” the content in the video in order to properly moderate (though you can just block people of course). You could have a bunch of filters like YouTube does to determine if your video should have ads and whatnot or you can rely on the community (or both).
The main issue with it is that we want to prevent “bad content” that being very poor quality content to skip being all detailed. To do that kind of filtering really requires some form of community review of the content as it’s infeasible to have it all manually reviewed. If you have a community review process you open the door to mass reporting and the like so you cannot simply automatically remove content if it gets a lot of reports, it must be manually reviewed (by watching the content) to ensure it’s fair to remove it. Lemmy, at least in my usage doesn’t have this desired “bad quality” filter outside of up votes/down votes which notably don’t remove the content (and so doesn’t remove the immense storage requirement)
It seems like we have fundamental differences in how the fediverse could and should work. I don’t see this conversation going any further, thanks for the interaction.
The mistake was allowing the internet to become “the cloud” in the first place.
People should be able to host their own shit on their own machine at home. This should be simple for people to set up, like a NAS with an App Store. Default to a secure config. Don’t make it too easy; if you try to sugarcoat it all, people won’t realize what they’re getting into (like now with cloud shit)
Otherwise we get what we have now - everything from TVs to social media to fucking door locks and lightbulbs needs a connection back to the manufacturer, and they can drop support at any time. This allows the worst of rent-seeking under the guise of “everyone too dumb to do on their own”, very similar to “we must not allow security because bad guys could hurt KIDS” (while true, it’s just an excuse to read everyone’s mail to protect the ruling class from any negative opinion brewing)
Great, so you pretty much only host established creators. Nearly all big channels on Youtube started with what is now considered shitty contend. They trained their editing skills over time, bought proper equipment once they really got into it and probably only found their style halfway through their “career”. If YouTube pre-filtered it’s videos, then the site would be dead by now.
Sure you can shove all responsibility to someone else and say they should self host it, but then you also have to acknowledge that peertube and the like eliminate 98% of all content before its made with its cobsiderably higher entry point, and that includes the good and the bad.
Honestly this feels like the only possible way to win against Youtube. Goal could be to just create standardized decentralized platform where number of different companies/organizations can host and serve their own content while still being searchable and accessible from single client application.
Major problem with Mastodon, Lemmy and Peertube is searching and browsing content from multiple instances is still difficult.
That doesn’t address the issue of storage and compute power for streaming to the absurd amount of users.
There’s been attempts before and it all comes down to file transfer time and storage (because at the time the servers weren’t transcoding for streaming the file. Secondary issue of buy in, like what we see with niche communities staying on reddit instead of moving to the fediverse.
There already exist a number of projects out there like peertube. Take a look at how even the most popular instances are doing. It’s not well.
The closest thing was around a decade ago, the popcorntime or popcornflix or whatever it was called app/program that was just a nice front end for torrenting videos and watching them before they finished downloading. Each individual user was responsible for their own storage, network connection speed, and compute power to render the video for themselves. Each end user was also contributing back through helping others to download the file via standard torrenting p2p stuff.
So now you need a front end to host the magnet links to the files, and a robust set of seed servers so no video is ever truly lost. That still doesn’t cover a significant portion of youtube’s functionality like reccomendations, comments, allowing creators to edit/adjust videos after the fact.
Unlike reddit, youtube is technologically complicated and impressive. Hell, read up on some of the stuff Netflix has had to do to achieve reasonable streaming quality and speed on an insanely smaller curated library.
A decentralized federated solution is possible, but there’s a shit ton more that would have to go into this than just appealing to the concept.
The closest thing was around a decade ago, the popcorntime
That method is still around, it’s just called stremio and you use a plugin called torrentio to get the torrent streaming functionality that popcorntime offered.
Would you mind sharing some ‘essential’ articles to read about this? I know the principle of how Netflix works, but always interested in learning more.
That still doesn’t cover a significant portion of youtube’s functionality like reccomendations, comments, allowing creators to edit/adjust videos after the fact.
Seems to me that anything beyond the actual hosting and serving of the video file is unnecessary to include by default in a federated video streaming solution. To drill down a bit, recommendations don’t need to be handled by an algorithm, the content creator can make their own list of videos or playlist - do we really want another reco algo passively controlling what we feed our minds? Comments could be something as simple as a mastodon or lemmy thread with the video as the OP. Content editing after the fact doesn’t seem like its that big a deal aside from computational and bandwidth overhead which would seem small compared to the task of serving multiple thousands of viewers at once.
Seems to me that anything beyond the actual hosting and serving of the video file is unnecessary to include by default in a federated video streaming solution....
You are basically saying "Other than the most expensive and complicated parts" the rest is easy or unnecessary. Which isn't necessarily accurate but still is being a bit dismissive of the problems at hand.
And one of the biggest criticisms of Peertube (aside from the dearth of content, which helpfully avoids the "expensive/complicated" parts) has been Discoverability. How do people watch your videos (or your playlist) if they don't have a way of knowing that your videos even exist?
I think we missed each other. My overall point is that aside from the hosting/serving, other federated networks/services could pick up the slack. The Federated Youtube doesn’t have to mirror Youtube exactly, or even mirror functionality all-inclusively (ie with reccos and comments etc. built-in), but could lean on other federated servers to provide similar functionality.
As I said, comments could be a lemmy/mastodon thread. Recommendations or other discoverability could be other threads or maybe even a completely different service that hasn’t been created yet, I don’t know, but I do know that any reco algo needs to be open and subscribed to, not jammed down our throats and gamed. In the meantime, everyone’s got a search engine, right?
Ultimately I don’t live in this social media/open source/development space too much, I just saw a way for these things to be built/used together to achieve an effect, distributing dev and process overhead and load across all the networks. I don’t have any insight on the bigger, more pertinent, file distribution problem.
I think it could work if most users contribute to the maintenance cost of their favorite instance. It’s just like mastodon and lemmy, but everything costs more.
It’s still just as expensive, you’re just adding administrative overhead.
You’d also spread the cost to more people, true, but who would operate a server for free (based on donations, but if it’s federated why should I pay for that one server?). Also, do you trust all those people to keep operating the storage for years to come? Or are you done with losing access to videos, because someone lost interest in running their instance?
Storage and bandwidth costs for video on demand are so incredibly high, I don’t think we’ll get a federated alternative to YouTube any time soon.
One alternative that seems promising is Nebula. It only fills a small part of the role YouTube currently occupies, since it focuses on being a platform for high quality professional content creators to make unfiltered content for their audience, but it’s funding model seems to be much more honest, stable, and so far viable than an ad-supported platform or the other alternatives. I don’t think anything could realistically replace all facets of YouTube (and I think the internet might be healthier if it were a little bit less centrally-located). A self-sustaining, straight-forwardly funded platform like Nebule seems like the best path forward to me.
Interesting, I thought Floatplane only hosted LTT content. Nebula has a LOT of creators spanning a very wide gamut of highly content. It has been gaining momentum steadily for several years now.
That said, I’d be happy to see them both succeed. We need more competition, having all internet video (minus NSFW and some short-form) hosted on one platform seems neither sustainable nor ideal.
So the answer is don’t. Let your clients help you. Like peer tube. If a video gets incredibly popular, then it will have lots of watchers at the same time. If it has lots of watchers at the same time, that means anybody who starts to watch it after those watchers have started will be downloading the video from the watchers and not from the server.
For static ads there will eventually be visual adblockers which detect ads not from their source but because they look like ads. (The mandated paid advertisement notice helps).
There is the utility that journalists use to capture YouTube video. A version that captured video content and then filtered ads visually would be unblockable.
I guess if you don’t use ad blockers you somehow get used to it. It’s like someone whose job is 100% outdoors vs. someone who works indoors and then has to do a day working outside. The person who is used to cold, wind, rain, scorching sun, etc. stops noticing, even though it takes a toll on them too.
Every once in a while I end up using a browser without ad blockers enabled and it’s incredible to me that some people live like that. It really is almost unusable. Things jump around as ads load in. Ads / videos pop over the content you’re trying to use. The useful part of a page might be 60% ads: ads along the sides and breaking up the text. And then there’s the bottom area of the page which is an endless scroll of “related content” ads.
That’s not a good analogy. It’s more like saying that whenever you go outdoors for a walk on the park or do grocery shopping, you have to give up 15 minutes of your time to “donate” blood to the rich.
Edit: I just finished reading your whole comment. Sorry friend. We’re on the same page.
No analogy is perfect. Yours gets at the reason for the ads – they want something from you and you have no chance to bargain or say no. Mine is more about how people can become accustomed to something that’s really unpleasant and after a while not really notice it.
My point is that to me (someone who blocks ads), trying to use the web without an ad blocker is extremely painful, and I find websites almost unusable. But, to someone who has never used an ad blocker, they’re used to the crap, and have developed some ‘immunity’ to the distracting images and work-arounds for the broken thing.
Anyhow, we’re on the same page. I just felt like explaining a bit better what I was getting at.
I’m fine with a variety of ads, but I really hate distracting animation. The current trend seems to be that every ad is animated, so every ad is blocked.
I’ve used adblockers for like 15 years and I genuinely get disgusted when watching YouTube without it. There’s no way I’ll go back. I even do sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.
The unfortunate thing is that I’m willing to pay a reasonable price for a lot of content creators, just not via Google/YouTube.
A dollar per channel? I follow 104 content creators om YouTube through RSS. And many more if we count all the other platforms. I can’t afford that.
It’s a difficult situation for viewers, creators and providers. I don’t have an answer, but a stop-gap solution I’d be happy to see is like 480p max for adblockers, pay for HD+. That’s reasonable based on how much ad-dodgers impact YouTube from what I’ve gathered.
I cannot watch a video from start to finish anymore. Thanks youtube. Almost every video is filled with bs fluff to reach the 8 minute mark. It annoys me greatly. Maybe also because I am in the industry and I learned in school to not use meaningless shit in my videos.
I’ve not thought about them time markers in a long time. One that was kinda funny and bearable was Dave509’s twist.
“I need to reach a certain time limit on my videos, so for a few more minutes I’ll just sit here, nod and say “I agree” and “I understand”. Feel free to share whatever with me…
Sits in absolute silence for 30 seconds while staring at the camera
Yes, I agree.”
But I have noticed I’ve gravitated to longer form videos, 30m+, for the last few years. I guess it has a lot to do with the fluff.
We shall from now on call such content creators “fluffers”.
Now that’s a solution.
Detecting adblock: 480/576p
Watching with ads: 720p/1080p/1440p Watching with Premium: 4K and high bitrate 1080p (and maybe 1440p?)
i also have always used adblockers, but once i had to put in effort circumventing YT ads earlier this year, i discovered sponsorblock and added it. kind of funny that had it not been for YT being an ass, i would have been fine with other kind of ads.
The thing that gets me is how little creators actually get per individual ad view. Now, collectively, with tens of thousands and millions of views, they get a good bag. But my watchtimes of that minute worth of ads per video? Literally nothing. A fraction of a cent so small it doesn’t exist. I could watch a creator semi-regularly for like 2 years and my contribution to their income by watching ads would be in the single digits. I give them two bucks over Patreon or something just once and that’s worth as much as me giving up hours upon hours of my life watching ads. Now, I can’t afford to give literally everyone I watch more than once a dollar or two. But I give some money here and there to a couple I watch a lot. To make up for my using an adblocker.
Honestly, I’d probably get YouTube Premium if it wasn’t fucking Google behind it.
Good on nexus to routinely stand against bigotry by taking down mods containing it. Every time a game comes out people make mods removing any lgbtqia+ persons or mention and I’ve seen several where they make minority characters white to “remove politics” and nexus slaps them down every time.
Recently in BG3 people made mods to make wyll white within days of game release and nexus took them down
Facial images “stored for no more than 2 weeks” just means that they have 2 weeks to transfer the data to another agency with no storage or transfer requirements.
On July 25, 2022 the lawsuit alleges, Lee asked her supervisor for three days off using her floating holidays to attend to her health. Her supervisor allegedly rejected the request saying it “would be a burden to the rest of the team” and that “there is a lot of work to be done.”
“Sorry, I’m too incompetent to account for any minor disruption, no matter how common, unavoidable, or legally mandated it may be. Please suffer quietly.”
It’s reddit, what in the hell do they have going on at the end of July that couldn’t accounting couldn’t wait a few days for? Did they have to count up all the gains from the fake gold they’ve stopped selling people? Tax season is over, the new fiscal year is already started, seems like bullshit paper pushing to me.
You have to understand that most accounting departments treat month-end with the same gravity as year-end. My job's accounts payable department starts sending month end deadline reminders on the 15th. It's absurd how much they focus on it.
(This is not an excuse for their abhorrent treatment of an employee, mind you, but it might help explain the twisted logic behind "end of July" possibly working against her.)
Point aside, what’s reddit doing that taking three days off for health makes it impossible to meet deadlines? What exactly are they juggling in that accounting department that demands so much from a single employee? Sounds like she was overworked and overwhelmed from the start.
Their software was open source. Their content is free. Their moderation is free. All they had to do was sell some ads and host the servers. And they fucked that up.
Yep this is pretty much what I came into the thread to read about. I’m sure the claims have merit and I don’t doubt that Reddit could have a toxic work culture (just look at the decision making over the years, clearly people aren’t comfortable pushing back against bad ideas)
Just usually when I hear about toxic grind culture, the company is producing something, be it content or some competitive product.
Reddit is doing what other open source devs are doing for free, and somehow doing that badly. The app is bad, the front end for new Reddit is constantly buggy, and it takes a very long time for things to get fixed.
It’s insane, isn’t it? Why do so many companies act like employees are their indentured servants and not professionals who provide their services to them in exchange for money?
If anything, the boss should have said “Are you sure just 3 days are enough? How about you take the whole week off instead and come back fully refreshed?”. I do hope the court throws the book at them - time off should be a goddamned sacred right if every employee.
So, we complain to a regulatory body, they investigate, they tell a company to do better or, waaaay down the road, attempt to levy a fine. Which most companies happily pay, since the profits from he shady business practices tend to far outweigh the fines.
Legal or illegal really only means something when dealing with an actual person. Can’t put a corporation in jail, sadly.
Like a built in brand dashboard where brands can monitor keywords for their brand and their competitors? And then deploy their sanctioned set of accounts to reply and make strategic product recommendations?
Sounds like something that must already exist. But it would have been killed or hampered by API changes… so now Spez has a chance to bring it in-house.
They will just call it brand image management. And claim that there are so many negative users online that this is the only way to fight misinformation about their brand.
Remember when Reddit had a daily donation goal to cover “site maintenance costs?”
They already monetized their fucking users, they’ve had users straight handing them money for fucking years now (sometimes for basically nothing in return!), but that’s never enough for these god damned vampires.
But back then Reddit still believed in opening up their platform, and their relation with their users was not adversarial. Their source code was even available on GitHub with an open source license! It didn’t feel much different to us sending monthly donations to instance admins and Lemmy devs now on Lemmy. People genuinely didn’t want Reddit to shut down back then.
Oh, I totally agree about the time period, but it also shows why this is such a big slap in the face to the userbase from Huffman. It literally ignores that time period and acts like this is the first time they’ve tried to wring money out of their userbase.
I keep saying that commercial, money making clients should donate 10% of their profit (or living money) to the server their user chooses. This is how FOSS services will survive.
How are they NOT?! Paying Reddit money to have someone go EDIT THANKS 4 DA AWARD KIND STRANGER is stupid, and it caused every thread to be clogged with asinine comments like “I WISH I CUD GIV U A WARD!”
I don’t know if you were there before gold existed, but it was a lot more like… Lemmy. None of that twaddle.
You know how spez was bitching about how reddit never made a profit? Yeah, now we know why. You know what his compensation was last year? $193,000,000. Fuck that arrogant prick.
Not to take Reddit’s / spez side, but to clarify, that’s not actually what he got in cash - what he got in cash on 2023 was something around 600k.
Those 193mil was in stock. Which kind of explains his drive to monetize users and kick out third-party apps: that piece of paper is only worth that much as long as he can keep the stock value afloat.
I just wish these platforms wouldn’t attract people like that. I get he is after a life changing amount of money no doubt, but 600k is a comfortable living by any metric.
Thank goodness for this decentralized stuff now. Communities are important, especially for the marginalized in society. There is a potential good in social technology without jerks with ad budgets and AI delusions of grandeur
I just wish these platforms wouldn’t attract people like that.
He was a Founder who left and came back. In all fairness, he was never attracted to it so much as he was instrumental in creating it.
The type of person he is is the type of person who created the platform to begin with…
Another example might be Jack Dorsey, who claimed that Elon Musk could be the only one to save Twitter.
In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.
These asshats are all alike. To get to the point where you can afford fleets of servers to create a service like this to begin with, you already were exploiting people and greasing palms. Other than Aaron Swartz, you should be pretty fucking skeptical of anyone who has been involved with Y Combinator.
I can’t understand how investors would fall for this. For the sake of humanity and my own mental health I hope they don’t. But I have a suspicion they will, and it goes to shows how fucked up the world is.
It's why they released news of the actual IPO on the same day they released the news of Google buying our data: they want to tie reddit and Google together in the public's mine, make reddit seem better than it is.
Around the time they re-corporatized into Alphabet. Probably a little while before that, so at least a solid decade since that’s been completely out the window.
Also, it only ever referred to putting ads before search results… which is how it is now. They clearly dropped any principles they had a long time ago. It’s honestly a little shocking more isn’t written about how Google was one of the earliest to begin its enshittification process, probably with the death of Google Reader, which was the death knell for RSS feeds and the Old Internet.
They restructured as Alphabet in 2015, and Reader was shut down in 2013. Google was founded in 1998. So that means it took about 15 years all told for Google to completely shed any ethics or morals they had about being a better company. That’s how quickly selling out your principles happens now.
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