"Site I only still care about to laugh at thinks I am going to give it my tax information." I'll have to think real hard about that one.
Investors should themselves have a good think about how the CEO that self-reported making zero profit in over a decade as one of the most popular social media sites — a site whose ad revenue has stuttered in the face of what is officially a month long protest — can afford to be handing out money to shitposting bot farms now.
I don't know, while I won't be going back there, I can see it help make reddit more mainstream, by attracting influencers. Imagine IG Influencers or Youtubers encouraging people to engage with them personally on reddit. I can see it actually working out alright for Reddit and possibly a small number of already successful influencers and celebrities. I don't see it making the experience any better for the average redditor, though
I can see it help make reddit more mainstream, by attracting influencers. Imagine IG Influencers or Youtubers encouraging people to engage with them personally on reddit.
…please like this post and friend me, and ring that bell. Oh man, you’re right, they’re going to go the tickytocky YouTube route.
There definitely were personalities on Reddit, like poem_for_your_sprog, who gained a following. I could see sprog making appreciable money with the proposed system.
Teah but it's not like the predominant mode of the website and it's not the same kind of like cult of personality you get with youtube creators. Poem for your sprog is like a novel little thing you randomly run into on the site and are like, ah cute. But if that kinda gimmicky shit was all the site revolved around it would for sure not be the same place anymore and I think it would lose a lot of people.
u/SchnoodleDoodleDo in the r/aww community (known for their cute animal perspective poems) was another. I could see all their upvotes being worth something.
I like this place. A lot. Yes, everything is not super polished. Yes, I have to be more active to find the content I want. Yes, there's a lot less content than on reddit. But the people here feel like real people, not people and bots who push agendas.
And I've always been somebody who contributes, so I'm here to help build the place I want.
i feel that, i have lerked on reddit for so many years. But i am ready to make a change, and do my best to make these platforms the new home of the internet.
I’ve been a lurker on Reddit for the last decade so contributing here has definitely been a learning experience. One issue I’m running into is, how does one easily share what they are contributing with everybody else? Discoverability is somewhat of an issue on here whether you are trying to make a new community or a new instance.
I mean, you're on fediverse.boo, and I'm on kbin.social, and I saw your comment here, and am replying to it. I'm pretty new here myself, but I'm finding no issue discovering communities on other instances and subscribing to them to have them show up in my feed. So I'd say subscribe to the communities you want to contribute to, and post. I'm sure we'll all be able to see it and interact with it.
I think this is really spot on. I wasn't looking for a "reddit alternative" that "kinda sucks" because it's not reddit. I was looking for an actual "reddit alternative," not a reddit clone. And yes, I've just been lurking up until now, but so far this seems so much more sane and reasonable. For the time being, at least. Until someone finds a way to turn it into a reddit alternative.
Let them test, I will just use container(so they can’t track my account). And if ad block not working, I will just not watch that video. And eventually move away from YouTube if it’s annoying.
It pushed me more towards degoogling. Was already using newpipe on Android and ignoring the YouTube app, and now I’m on freetube on desktop. No need for Google account anymore to look at the feed I want.
At the moment, I am in a hybrid state. I also use Indivious to watch the videos, but I still use the subscription view of YouTube to see what video is new. I have 145 subscriptions. I installed a new addon Redirector, which you can guess what it does, and it redirects each new tab to an Indivious instance if it's a YouTube video page. So YouTube thinks I stopped watching videos at the moment. Sometimes I forget to middle click instead and get reminded how bad the ads are.
The reason I am doing that is, because I feared Google could delete my account, if I keep blocking ads with uBlock Origin. It probably never happened to anyone, but the uncertainty was too high to risk for me, as I need this account for other things. Also sometimes I want to like or comment on the video too.
You can plop a youtube channel URL into an RSS reader and it’s a valid RSS. You don’t need a Google account in that case, but of course Google could just stop supporting RSS at any point.
That's interesting! I use RSS (and love it) and never tried this on YouTube. You know what, this is actually amazing! Right now I am visiting some channels which I do not want to miss content on and add as RSS News. Thank you for this!
On the off chance you aren’t aware, you can export your YT subs and import them into Invidious via a json file.
I still occasionally visit the actual YouTube frontpahe for the algorithm’s suggestions, but all my subscriptions live on Piped, FreeTube, and on my phone, LibreTube.
Invidious has been a saviour for me on mobile. The ads were so painfully long. To make it worse, I’d use YouTube to help fall asleep, adjust it to the right volume, then BAM! Loud advert. I didn’t use an ad blocker on PC for ages because I get that bandwidth is expensive as hell, but they really started taking the piss and I gave up.
These tech companies have underestimated their utility. They are mostly providing mindless time wasters. If you try to charge money or create inconvenience, people will look for something else to do.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere. The VC grow-at-all-costs business model is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t scale when profitability becomes a priority.
Youtube produces almost none of their own content, instead they rely on other humans to create that content.
Use your ad blocker if you want, but stop treating youtubers as google employees (they’re not, they often have a much more frustrating relationship than you do) and start supporting them through other means.
To you, those people are just helping you waste your time. if that’s your real argument here, stop wasting your fucking time and do something else more worth your precious time, or start supporting content producers directly through non-youtube methods. Or just stop fucking watching.
Those people aren’t on youtube because they’re buying into corporate google dick-wrangling, they want to produce videos and have them get watched, and youtube is a place that hosts their videos for free AND gives them ad revenue share for hosting youtube ads.
You aren’t some hero for adblocking youtube but still watching it. google won’t notice your small dip in their revenue, but the youtuber who made it will.
Wanna support the people who entertain you (or, i guess, “waste your time”, if that’s what you consider entertainment to be — if all you want is to waste your time, don’t ads do the same thing for you?). Pay them directly for their content. Want to take a fake stand that supports nobody but yourself and your own inconveniences, install an ad blocker and boast on the internet about how you’re totally fucking over google and the people who create youtube content by doing so. But don’t treat yourself like some hero for doing so.
I was defending the people who produce content on youtube, and who do not enjoy the benefits of google’s wealth and market position, and are just trying to create their content.
adblock youtube if you want, but unless you’re also supporting the creators of your content outside of google, i have never paid google a dime either. don’t pretend this is about a big corporation. you just think you deserve to be entertained for free, regardless of who put in the effort to create it.
If you’re REALLY anti-google/youtube, STOP USING THEM. If you watch them with adblock, google can still spin your usage statistics into something that will appeal to investors, but youtube creators will be wondering why their numbers dwindle, because they don’t have investors to (lie to / spin numbers at). You’re still helping youtube, even with an adblocker.
On the other hand, if you support content creators outside of youtube? you are supporting them directly, without youtube’s involvement and without google even getting a cut. I do this for several youtubers, and support even more through merch and etc.
But sure keep telling me i’m defending the landlords because i’m getting mad at you for mistreating the staff and pretending you’re sticking it to the landlords.
To your point about watching YouTube with adblockers still helping Google due to viewership numbers. That’s exactly why after I stopped supporting blizzard (at first due to the blutzchung controversy, then everything else that happened) I immediately stopped playing hearthstone, yes, I was playing it free, I never spent any money on it, but I didn’t want to even indirectly help by giving them usage statistics, or by giving paying people even a little bit of a quicker matchmaking.
The modern Internet community has an interestingly illogical take on free services. Either use them or pay for an alternative. But the average user has grown up on free services and will happily insist on having their cake and eating it too
If content creators provide 90% or even 60% of value to YouTube, why is Google a trillion dollar company while major content creators are fighting for scraps that fall from their table? Why are content creators who aren’t in the top tier compensated so little for what they bring to the table?
YouTube is nothing without content. Unionize. Stand together and get paid what you’re worth.
where do i find the 10-40% percent of youtube-produced content on youtube you’re talking about?
Google is a trillion dollar company because they do far more than youtube, and make the majority of their money from taking a percentage of ad revenue. This does include youtube, and youtube is only profitable to google because they can sell ads on top of it, because video hosting on the internet is fucking expensive.
i pay google nothing, just like you. i do, however, support my favorite youtubers outside of google revenue streams with my own money, either through direct support or merchandise.
Both installing an adblocker and not even going to youtube will cost google money. I don’t care which you do. But if you do watch specific youtubers regularly, support them directly, even if you do use an ad blocker.
You’re not a hero for adblocking google. You’re a hero if you support content creators outside of google, whether or not you watch them on youtube using an adblocker.
I pay for Premium now since it includes music streaming which is convenient to use. If they raise the price too much, I’ll absolutely just go back to mp3s and deal with the ads on YouTube and just watch less content on there. $15 is about my cap before I do that.
Their attention is your lifeblood, and you’re actively giving them reasons to look elsewhere.
👍
My attention is all the currency YouTube will ever get from me - and it should be enough. If I post videos to YouTube (for nothing in return) and I talk to people about videos I saw on YouTube or link them to videos - then I am a net gain for Google and they should treat me as such. If anything, they should be working (nicely) to try to get me to want to pay (or view ads) and just be thankful I’m there if I don’t pay (or view ads). Instead they’ve chosen to work at ensuring everyone is so goddamn pissed off at their bullshit that they’d rather make it their full-time job to never give them another dime. Good job, Google! Smart!
Edit: Oh look, half a dozen lectures about how Google has to make money somehow. Hi there YouTube shills, I thought I would see you here.
I will quite happily pay a reasonable price for the privilege of avoiding ads.
I understand why people block ads, even though they are a a free tier, even if I don’t agree with it.
The fact that the cost of YouTube Premium almost doubled overnight is making me rethink my ethics, when my current subscription is up for renewal, I will be reassessing whether to cease watching YouTube, watch YouTube with ads or determine another way of supporting content creators.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you. Attention is all the currency they’ll ever get from you, that’s totally cool, absolutely. I’m totally that way too. But they’ve got to make money somehow, so if you’re not the paying customer, someone else has to be.
I’m not saying it has to be ad sales either, but if we want a world in which we can use services for free without ads, we need to come up with an alternative way for them to make money. It has to come from somewhere, and by the bucketload.
If every user thinks like you, then it doesn’t matter how many people you talk to or share links with, you’re not a net gain on their service, you bring nothing to it.
Why should they, or anybody, be thankful that you honour them with your presence, if you contribute nothing of value? What makes you so entitled to use somebody’s product for free with no strings attached?
Ads suck, I’m eager for us to move past them once we figure out an alternative that keeps products in business and us receiving things for free. But we can’t deny the reality we live in right now either. Even huge companies like Google (who yes, do suck) have to make money to survive.
But they have been, and for years. All the years I’ve run a smartphone Google has harvested and profited from my data. From Gmail to Chrome (before I switched) to Maps, etc - they have profited from people’s data at scale. So the argument that they need to make money somehow falls flat for me.
Also, if they charged like $2 a year to block ads, plenty of people would buy it. But like most things lately, the enshitification of our user experience continues. It’s not enough for companies like Google to “make money” - it’s never enough and their greed has no boundaries.
That’s why you see people like us pushing back - enough is enough.
Google doesn’t make money directly from harvesting your data, they make money from harvesting your data then showing you ads based on that data. So if you’re running an ad blocker then they aren’t making money from you (unless you pay them for stuff like subscriptions and apps). As ad blocking becomes more common they are definitely going to get more draconian to try to claw back that money (growth is infinite, profits must go up /s).
Also BTW Google probably makes more like $50 per user per year on average (looking at revenue and internet population) so they would never offer a $2/year ad block unless forced to by regulation.
YouTube creates no content and it’s reliant on people volunteering their time and talent to them. Fuck the idea that we need to pay google to access content they only host and don’t pay fairly for.
To answer your questions - users such as this bring something more valuable than ad money. They bring data. Google harvests data and metrics on users in a million ways, packages this up, and sells it for considerably more than they make on ads. In free services such as this, YOU are the product.
Ads suck, nobody wants to watch them, and they simply represent google maximizing shareholder value at every opportunity, as they are legally bound to do under American capitalism. YouTube ads are not a critical revenue stream that will make or break them.
Copy-pasting this from a comment I made a few days ago. I’m so tired of this misconception. Google’s business model literally disincentivizes selling personal data. The business model is built on selling targeted advertisements. Google wants to keep this data to itself because it gives them a competitive advantage in the ad space.
Selling your data would give competitors power in the marketplace. So yes, Google collects data and uses it, but no, Google does not sell your data. It sells targeting BASED on your data.
Very different, regardless of if it is any better.
Not all interested buyers are in the ad business, and governments can make payments in a way that is difficult to audit from a third party perspective, definitely not in any currency or a change in the balance sheet. I wish things where different but seems to me that paying won’t protect me from them harvesting every bit they can.
Look I hate YouTube ads too, and ads in general, but let’s say every user of a service is like you.
I understand the message about needing to fund services to exist, but that stance I feel doesn’t always really work too well. Since if other users were like them then it’d also mean there might be a lot of stuff that doesn’t exist anymore which could be a pro like microtransactions ceasing to exist and move to subscription model failing.
And for YouTube might be completely different where depending on their taste maybe click baits turned people away if the person hated them, so those don’t exist. And long winded videos attempting to take advantage of the algorithm failed if they were someone who didn’t like videos that wasted their time, and everyone is like them.
Reddit might still support third party apps if everyone was like them, and lemmy bigger. That’s why if everyone was like them argument is just a weird one, since it turns minority actions into a majority and changes way too many things to focus on one singular thing.
I think generally you will find that people of this opinion hold that it is unreasonable that we have privatized basically all of the internet infrastructure. These people tend to be in favor of expecting the consumer spends more on hardware for hosting, and enthusiasts, hobbyists, non-profits, and occasionally companies develop the software necessary to make the internet function, rather than companies just paying for tons and tons of warehouses of servers, and then just forcing the software to all become fucked up walled gardens while the actual utilities everyone rests upon is left to rot.
reddit started trialing a "Community Points" program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn "Community Points" that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don't know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.
My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn't based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It's possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it's existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn't been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.
In any case, this article isn't based on any official announcement, and reddit has been "trialing" a similar program for over four years. I wouldn't hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it'll work well if it's actually released.
Why do I suspect that, even if one were to spend 8 hours a day on Reddit, making comments that all were gilded, you'd still earn less than minimum wage?
Hilarious that Huffman openly admitted that Reddit “isn’t profitable” (somehow) and they have to squeeze 3PAs out to try to make up for that, but apparently they found spare funds in the budget to pay spambots to keep reposting content to keep things from going barren.
“Shit, the people who actually cared about the platform and contributed good content are leaving. Quick, throw money at the problem instead of fixing the issues we created!”
The caveat there is that at the time there wasn't a invite system. You'd just add mods. So him getting modded there isn't as big a deal as one would think.
The fact that it wasn't banned until after he was long gone and only then after a CNN piece on it, that should raise an eyebrow.
It’s possible that someone else made him the moderator of that sub, but this shit still makes me laugh every time that I see it. Steve Huffman, someone so deeply interested in jailbait that he’d even mod a comm about it!
It'll be just like YouTube, where people are huddled on the floor praying to "the algorithm" with each bit of "content" they post, hoping to make it big as a "professional Redditor".
I can't wait to see the per-user algorithmic feeds. One post from r/conspiracy or r/conservative scrolls past your screen, and suddenly it's all you see.
I see senior management written all over you! I promise ya - keep working hard n showing up early and that’s you in the corner office in 5 years. Ya just gotta stick around.
Just gonna hijack your comment for visibility. reddit started trialing a "Community Points" program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn "Community Points" that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don't know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.
My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn't based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It's possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it's existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn't been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.
In any case, this article isn't based on any official announcement, and reddit has been "trialing" a similar program for over four years. I wouldn't hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it'll work well if it's actually released.
I wonder if that was born of the Dogecoin tipping system that was around for a while in... 2017/2018? I forget.
I'm pretty sure they thought the awards/gilding was going to be their best bet to Moneyville after Premium flopped. It's basically just a rebranding with the ability to gift it.
Oh look, it’s almost as Meta is an untrustrworthy actor that plans to EEE the fediverse. I consider any instance that federates with Meta a lost cause, to be defederated as well.
I’m new to here so maybe I’m missing something. But why is it a problem if people from the fediverse can communicate with people on threads? It shouldnt negatively effect people on Mastodon right?
Yes the article is showing that meta likely wants to control people in annoying ways but isn’t that only an issue if you’re a Threads user? It’s cool to be able to talk with people in Threads from Mastodon as long as you don’t need threads yourself.
Of course they haven’t actually connected up threads yet as far as I know.
EEE stands for embrace, extend, extinguish. This is the embrace step, where everything is all sunshine and flowers. Actually the whole thing is sunshine and flowers, just the last step happens in that shaded area where nobody is paying attention.
But anyways, they embrace it and it seems like they are supporting the good thing.
Then they extend it with new shiny features. They are a large company and can afford to throw a bunch of developers at the project. This seems like they are doing more good, but the subtle thing is that now development outside of what they are doing is dictated to a degree by what they are doing. Sure, others can ignore the new features, but if they are important to users, doing so will mean that more users move over to their platform.
They can also adopt proprietary features that cost licensing fees to use. Or use their own. This essentially locks other devs out of those features, kinda like when a company decides to charge a ridiculous amount for access to their API, you either go along with it or you lose access to that API.
Once they have a lion’s share of the larger platform’s user base, they gain some power over the platform itself. They can start dictating things otherwise they’ll cut dissenters off.
Of course, the next question is why would this be any different from just defederating with meta right now? It mostly comes down to inertia and people getting used to things. Say your friends are on threads and you’re on some other non-meta instance. If you aren’t federated, then you have other ways of communicating with your friends that you use and are used to. But if you are federated, then maybe you use the platform to communicate with your friends. Now all of a sudden there’s a demand from meta to send Zuckerberg-compatible energy credits that would leave you defederated if your instance doesn’t comply.
In the first case, meta’s demands don’t affect you at all. In the second case, ignoring them would disrupt your routine, which will be frustrating and that frustration might get targetted at meta or maybe it will be targetted at the instance when they decide to ignore the demand and defederate. Now multiply that by thousands of users and you might be able to see how having a connection with meta might give them the power to disrupt instances they have no direct control over.
Now that said, I don’t know how much power meta will be able to build here. Personally, I already like the feature set they’ve got right now and think it only really needs tweaking. Reddit adding features to make their new site more attractive never even slightly tempted me to stop using the old site or an app that had nothing to do with the company. Maybe I’m lacking imagination, but I can’t think of any features that would both attract users en masse, would be difficult for other instances to add, and would be something that I’d personally want. And any threat to remove meta’s userbase from the fediverse sounds like threatening me with a good time.
So I lean towards defederating but not because I’m worried about meta eventually ruining this but because I think they will immediately ruin it by making it too popular. Kinda like Reddit’s growing popularity over time seemed to correlate with a decline in average quality before even taking the admins and mods into account (though I’d bet that the growing popularity also contributed to those declines as well).
The thing is, meta has a user base 100sx the size of the fediverse, and absolutely no incentive to EEE a project that is very very niche and inaccessible to a lay audience.
GoogleTalk once federated with XMPP/jabber, good times until their userbase was big enough to deferedate again, crippling the jabber network. It will happen again if we let it.
Metas plan is to draw users into their network and use the fediverse as an initial catalyst (“look! so much content already there!”). Once their userbase is large enough, they will deferate again claiming protocol difficulties or something equally vague, but they will just want to start rolling out advertising which would not be displayed to users from other instances. Most users will not keep two accounts and jusy stay with the big corp and leave the original fediverse again.
There will be a script to block their recognition just as there is a ton of scripts to work about other anti-adblocks. You could always go watch a video in incognito and just dont use your account.
Ultimatively this will lead to less interaction on the platform, their ads are so penetrant that you can't even watch anything properly anymore, so more people will adblock -> get banned -> not interract anymore
Ad companies can't handle the idea that people don't want to be hit with ads every 5 minutes. "Well, it's just BAD ads"... no, it's having my experience constantly interrupted.
It's both. I dread the coming election year, and it's why I won't even THINK of paying for a streaming service that has advertising. I will pay the extra money to avoid them.
I would be okay with it if the amount of ads and their length was reasonable, like one in the beginning and one at the end or something. For a longer video I wouldn't even mind one at the midway point.
I didn't start using adblockers until I was literally inundated and bombarded and sometimes with ads running the length of movie (no, literally).
It completely ruins the experience. I'm happy to support my creators directly though and I do.
part of the issue, imo, is that creators also put ads in their videos. So you get two pre-roll ads, a sponsor segment, an ad in the middle, and then another sponsor segment. Maybe throw in some product placements as well. And one of those ads might be 1.5 hours long if you don't manually skip it. I know I'm not the only one who woke up after falling asleep to a video to find themselves 45 minutes into some ad.
After living with ublock and sponsorblock for so long, it's shocking to watch youtube without them.
I don't mind the sponsor segments as much, I usually just skip to the end of them, but that's only because it's how my creators make actual money, and it's not every video, and when you have adblock on, then it's not as annoying.
But yes, you're right, couple ads with sponsorships and product placements and soon the actual meat of the video is one tenth of the length. So what are we really watching here?
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