Literally one of the smartest things that Capital could do is to pool a tiny amount of their resources and make Netflix and Youtube free for the masses. These are incredible tools for keeping the masses placated.
one of the only good things about the stage of capitalism that we're in right now is that the capitalists are complete fucking idiots with no instincts for the preservation of their class. the competence has been fully bred out of them Habsburg-style at this point
Death to America
Conversely, they've realized the general population is even more servile and neutered then they expected and they are doing this to constantly reinforce there's nothing we can do and they'll make things as shitty as they want and nobody's gonna do anything about it. They're trying to soft sell us on being back in a feudal society and they're about 60% of the way there.
Working in exchange for housing with no pay is gonna be a thing again in our lifetimes.
"Now watch this drive" but about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
Honestly if they take us back to feudal relationships it makes it easier to do revolution because it completely decomplicates who the oppressors are to the average person. It makes the enemy easy to see. One of the biggest factors of capitalism that helps them prevent revs is how the enemy is less identifiable.
I don't think this is actually true, feudal relations were very stable and persisted for millennia in some places. It feels that way because the propaganda machine isn't justifying feudal social relations currently. Company housing for example is slowly becoming more popular, even in the west.
The corvee labour system makes it extremely obvious you're working for someone else and more than you need to than the wage system where you work some number of hours get some number of money in wages and go home. The amount you work to pay your own wage isn't obvious. Having to work for a feudal lord or having to give up things to them directly via taxation makes them easily hated and peasant uprisings happened all the time because of it, what they didn't have was a conscious rejection of feudalism as a system but they knew who to blame (other than Jews obviously). Under capitalism people often complain about taxation and burgled theft because they make it plain who's taking what from whom.
Peasant uprisings were much less common than labor unrest today, though granted that isn't exactly the same.
Additionally, exploitation in peasant economies was not always as transparent as you indicate. Often, it was at least slightly hidden. For example, a peasant might be required to give sacks of grain to the lord who owns the mill, and instead of being allowed to keep some for seeds, they must buy the seeds from the lord, inequalities here can hold the exploitation. Further, debt was a constant of feudal relations and gives a veneer of legitimacy to exploitation, just as it does today. Further, surplus value extraction can be seen as acceptable to the peasant if they believe it is justified. The lord can claim that his cut is in exchange for protection, insurance, and other services. This applies to taxation today.
Good points.
well that is some wishful thinking.
I think it's arguably that they are beginning to see the end of the window of profitability and so they are gutting things on the way out. Obviously there are true failsons fucking things up like Elon, but a lot of it I think is actually them acting reasonably from the standpoint of quarterly gains and perhaps even medium-term profit-maximizing, because how intrusive Netflix ads are during a nuclear war doesn't really make a difference (meaning short-term gain is the only thing to optimize).
Suffering from success
It's a shame the ruling class can't agree on anything if it gets in the way of their short term returns.
That's assuming Capital exists as a single centrally planned homogenate, rather than a set of competing factions all warring over the stream of revenue that media consumers produce. We did once try something akin to this, with the Public Broadcasting Service. And it was very successful, at least for a little while, in its effort to command a large audience and manipulate public opinion along a liberal ideological view.
But now we have a much more Anarcho-Capitalist approach to infotainment. We've implemented a tiered and tranched distribution of media services, from Talk Radio on the bottom-of-the-barrel free feed to Pay-Per-View streaming services on the high end. They all serve the same fundamental role as Netflix/Youtube, but the lower tiers tend to have a more vulgar and poorly produced advertising methodology.
And people still consume these channels voraciously. No shortage of folks who will suffer through five minute YouTube ads or who eventually buckle to the "Please Pay Me!!" pop-ups that soft gate the service. Similarly, Netflix has no trouble maintaining a subscriber pool of a quarter billion registered accounts (with households averaging north of 2 viewers).
The payment model serves two purposes. It forces people to register their participation - through an online account - and allows digital tagging and tracking of consumption habits. It also provides a threat of deprivation to disobedient proles. If you don't clock in, you won't have enough money to pay your bills. That includes entertainment. The cost isn't particularly prohibitive, even to the poorest economic cohorts. But you are required to buy in and sign up and maintain the account, which puts an onus on people to keep in the good graces of the capitalist managers.
As a wise man once said, if you're good at something never do it for free. 
But how are the investors supposed to make money off of it?!
If their goal was to placate sure.
If their goal was to reinforce that every single tiny thing you enjoy can be taken away from you with a snap of the fingers if you even think about complaining about the people who could make that decision the situation makes more sense.
It's Alphabet, they can 100% afford to have youtube premium be the default, they're just greedy.
One of the core tenets of this charade of a system is that people need to be convinced that there's no such thing as "free". Otherwise they will start thinking that a socialist system is possible and we can't have that.
what is happening? Is big tech profitability collapsing? It seems like every big website is trying very hard to cut costs and find new sources of revenue right now
i firmly believe it's the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to "free money" since the GFC in 2007.
[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to "free money" when COVID hit].
now, in less than 1.5 years, it's gone from "free money" to 5.5%. that's enough to make "investors" [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak…
to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.
i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism
you could even call it enclosure
Digital enclosure is exactly what it is. Reddit did it to forums but the squeeze right now is to fully enclose the attention economy itself.
Retvrn to phpbb
that's pretty much lemmy/hb/etc
Link aggregators with comment threads are not the same as forums
I mean yeah, I used to post on a half dozen BBS forums
I was a big fan of Invisionfree. used to play Survivor ORGs on there. Tapatalk bought out zetaboards, the supposedly "upgraded" version of invisionfree that actually was worse, then transitioned all the already-zeta boards to tapatalk's own system which is WAY WAY WAY worse (zeta was at least usable) but they just straight up deleted any invision boards that weren't "upgraded" to zeta on time. They were doing transfers from the servers for awhile and I was able to "rescue" the games I hosted that way but so many boards are just gone now. And Invision had custome themes so the boards were pretty but tapatalk has just one ugly ass theme that sucks ass and I hate it.
They also bought out Yuku, deleted a bunch of inactive boards (including mine, that had some important memories on it) and transfered the active ones to their shitty system.
I fucking hate them.
Reddit did it to forums
Now now, lets not let tapatalk off the hook here.
it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning
the tech industry now is a lot like the 1800s rail industry in that it's changing society and hype drives investment but profitability just isn't there
the metaverse is the 21st century equivalent of plots of land next to planned railway developments
Death to America
yeah but also stupid
my guess is that gulf state monarchy investors (Saudi, Qatar, UAE etc) haven't been satisfied with the profit margins and are demanding more control over the companies, whereas American/European investors are possibly more focused on market share
could be rising competition from Chinese tech companies as well
It could also be a collapsing bubble where everyone's realizing personal data sold to advertising companies isn't as valuable as everyone assumed it was 15 years ago. They ran out of people to scoop data from. Everyone's already got every possible type of targeted ad pointed directly at their eyeballs 24/7. The market is cornered and there's nothing left to speculate on
I think this is normal Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall stuff
I go out of my way to follow the rules, like watching a sport even on the NBC website with their commercials, and then after ten minutes they say “you must sign in to your tv provider”.
So I get aboard my ship, put on my eyepatch and find the game in an Iranian server farm. I don’t want to be a pirate, they make me.
Trying to find the seasons of the One Piece anime that haven't been uploaded to Netflix yet (and were taken down from Crunchyroll and Funimation) turned me into the King of the Pirates. 
A VPN and a decent sized hard drive with Jellyfin is way cheaper than 12 different streaming services that either all have the same shit, don't have the shit I want, or has ok original content that gets canceled after 2 seasons.
But its a very individualist solution. As soon as you try to expand the solution to a wider network of friends and neighbors, you dramatically raise your risk of being targeted for legal or physical reprisals.
Kinda off topic but I'm actually mad that one piece (live-action) is good because i know Netflix will ruin it somehow. I'm still  about the Witcher
As long as they don't fire the current showrunners, the show will stay good. At the most they'll cancel it early.
If they fire Matt Owens or Steven Maeda, that's when to bail.
"Early" meaning in less than the 20+ years it'd take to complete? 
Can't even believe I'm saying this but I'm sort of interested in seeking it out. I'm not much of an anime watcher but I like the manga and the early stretch of it is massively nostalgic for me
They're condensing a lot of it so it'll probably take 10 years to complete instead of 20. I mean the absolute worst case would be if they cancel after S2 now, so we'd at least get up to Drum Island I reckon. And like I said, I don't think we'd get a GoT situation as long as Matt Owens is running the show, cos the only changes he did to the story (besides cutting stuff for time) was to better set up stuff in Arlong Park that'll only pay off in Sabaody Archipelago, which are really good changes imo.
The anime has killed off my harddisks space because the only way to I could get the early seasons was in giant compilations yo-hohoho. There's also apparently a remake/remaster of the OP anime somewhere with better animation that I have no idea how to find 
At $17M/episode, I imagine they're just going to drop the series in another year or two.
I'd be happy just to see how the hell they're gonna do Chopper and Brook. 3 seasons would satisfy me, 5 would be more than i could hope for
it'll be incredibly funny if the show somehow lasts long enough to get to the current arcs and we'll get to live action gear 5
I dont understand how there isnt a mass exodus from youtube already, whats keeping people there? If they pulled this shit in 2005 itd be done for.
massive backlog of content, only place creators can easily make money from uploading vids I'm pretty sure, so the big creators will never switch, and a lot of smaller creators have at least a fantasy of making it big if their vids go viral, if not a goal. Honestly a government would have to step in a break up YT at this point, it's got a monopoly on vids and I don't think any platform will ever be able to break it tbh.
Boomer take
With the attention span of Zoomers and younger generations, TikToks will be everything that anybody needs as nobody can watch videos longer than 3 minutes anyways
People keep saying this but it really doesn't hold up. Moistcritikal videos get viewed like crazy and the guy posts 2-3 videos of himself rambling at a camera every day, each 10-20 minutes long, no jumpcuts or loud noises either. The daily Hasanabi videos are all easily 30 minutes long. Hell, MrBeast videos are all well over 10 minutes long as well. Wendigoon has seen a meteoric rise over the past year and his videos are all hour long stories about creeypasta stuff etc. Iceberg videos have been a huge trend and those are all really long as well.
The theory that people's attention spans keep getting shorter and people can't watch longer videos anymore doesn't match up with the trends on Youtube. Videos are not getting shorter, not at all.
People have been saying this about the attention spans of the youths at LEAST since Television dropped, and probably since books dropped
People have been saying this about the attention spans of the youths at LEAST since Television dropped, and probably since books dropped
Yep. Plato wrote about being worried that the rise of literacy rates among the youth would rot their brains, because they'd never have to memorize stuff if they could just write it down.
There's actually some merit to that. People have a harder time remembering things that they know are written down and retrievable (because there's less need)
Absolutely. There's also some merit to similar worries about television and the internet. It's just never the civilization-ending infocalypse that it's cracked up to be (or at least not so far).
The theory that people's attention spans keep getting shorter and people can't watch longer videos anymore doesn't match up with the trends on Youtube.
well… there's a few things about that. Within youtube itself there are different incentives than there might be on other platforms, and changes in rules, recommendation algorithms, and advertising methods have all contributed to shaping what kind of content does well as much or more than people's attention spans or preferences. There was a time when short videos were king, but changes to monetization and such shifted away from that.
But if you look industry wide there has been an explosion in the short form stuff. it's not prima facie evidence of declining attention spans but it is a real trend that has probably brought the average down.
IMO it's just two different ways to retain attention: a long drawn out explanation or story with the promise of some payoff where it all comes together or builds to a big moment (often lacking), versus rapid fire content coming at you so fast it doesn't even really matter if its that good as long as its stimulation.
the "declining attention span" thing feels real in other ways though. Most people I know couldn't sit down and read a book for any length of time if they tried.
Absolute horseshit, the kids watch long form content at 2x speed. They still want it, they just want it 'faster'. This will also continue to change when they get old and everything slows down for them.
 back in my day, we watched 5 hour video essays about Goof Troop
Youtube has that fake tiktok "shorts" feature, but I'm pretty sure it's just people reposting content from tiktok and other short-form video sites.
Back in my day, we didn't have 5 hour video essays, we only had 10 minute videos. And even that was considered too long back then.
I still remember RLM's Plinkett reviews being cut into separate 10 minute uploads
We used to watch horrible quality uploads of anime fansubs uploaded to YouTube in three parts.
There are a couple youtube natives who make the original content there and then export to tiktok
TikTok pays like shit.
Video essays remain a very popular and successful medium. Channels like Caddicarus have actually SWITCHED from frequent shorter content to occasional longform content because it does better for them.
Social media changes incredibly quickly. Think of how recently TikTok came onto the scene, and how it changed every other site. Reddit made the worst video player ever to try to copy TikTok.
That is the only example in the last 10 years and they only 'succeeded' because bytedance was willing to burn tens of billions of dollars.
10 years is not that long in terms of business. I remember a time when MySpace and LiveJournal felt too big to ever be surpassed.
That's the place where the videos are
Video hosting is expensive is the main reason. Only google has the money and they can't even make it profitable
Whats stopping them? A couple things, is my guess.
How many hours of garbage are uploaded there, every minute? The bar for entry is nonexistent. All you need is a webcam.
YouTube will lose its crown eventually but there is nothing waiting in the wings as a replacement. Yet.
Patiently waiting for China's video service to show up and be much better.
Yeah, true. But I think it would need to gain some significant traction in English language countries for me to start using it the way that I do with YouTube.
TikTok sorta has. Though it mostly claimed the short formats that youtube seemed to have abandoned when it dropped
People did try to leave in the late 2000s/early 2010s
I remember when all the big critics (which were popular style of video at the time) movied to Blip.TV
i tried to switch to vimeo back in 2011 and they deleted my shit (gameplay videos) because it wasn't "artistic" enough. instantly went walk of shaming back to youtube
WTF? Vimeo is for finding full episodes ofbshows that get deleted from youtube instantly. When did they get so pretentious?
They always have. I think at one point you had to pay to have your stuff hosted there. It made sense if you say, made an art house movie with lots of boobies and didn't want it blocked on youtube.
It costs a lot of money to host all that video
There isn’t a competing video platform.
Video data is really really big. Not many have the resources to store it forever and send it globally on demand. And also pay money back to the creators who upload the videos in the first place.
Vidme tried and failed, not profitable.
Vimeo is not comparable, it’s for corporate/work/advertising videos. Not for consumers.
What the fuck is Dailymotion?
Netflix is curated shows, not comparable.
Sky is paid sports on TV, not comparable.
Nebula only works because viewers have to pay, not to mention that uploading to Nebula is extremely exclusive due to their high standards for creators. It makes sense that Nebula exists - but it isn’t a YouTube competitor.
The only other free consumer video platform right now is TikTok, which is only suited for short vertical videos.
A competitor to YouTube that does the same thing is not possible. Only a megacorp like Google has the money to throw away.
ByteDance could probably afford to make a western-facing youtube clone, but there's presumably enough competition in China that they wouldn't bother doing something just for the west.
This is making me wonder, what are the Chinese youtube equivalents? IIRC Weibo's more of a twitter. Is it just BiliBili?
They want you to give them money or die
You know, if they just simply kept ads to be some banner on the top and bottom of the page, maybe some image on the side that didn't interrupt you, the most intrusive thing being that the ad may be brightly colored and animated so your eye moves to it, nobody would EVER block ads. But they brought this upon themselves.
Used to be that way, and we definitely blocked ads then too. Having seizure flashes in the corner of your eye is incredibly annoying
Back in the day when Google ads initially rolled out, they billed themselves as the "ethical" version of ads because they restricted things like flashing colors, popups, etc which had gotten really bad. That was when Google's motto was still "don't be evil".
Yeah adwords were the best ads have ever been online
 I started using adblock when ads only existed in this form because I had ADHD.
They cannot do it any other way. The vertical integration, the monopolization, the ridiculous amount of advertisement, it's all a race towards a shrinking profit. Carve out a smaller niche for advertising with targeted ads (just run your ads for the people who will actually buy your product!) but all you're doing is saturating an almost critically saturated market of advertisers. As the margins continue to shrink, my guess is you'll see a very shitty "free" tier and some very expensive memberships. The "enshittification" continues
I haven't seen this and i use ublock origin. Is there any context or other source  ?
They are slowly rolling it out; the reports have been trickling in for the past few weeks. Last I heard was firefox users getting hit. Apparently not even uBlock is immune.
You just have to keep updating it unfortunately. It's messing up my custom filter blocks which is annoying
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/178yasm/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_october_16_2023/
It's a contest of endurance between the uBlock devs/open source community and Google. There is nothing they can do to fully prevent us from blocking the ad on our end, but they can make us keep changing how we block it over and over - I suspect this will continue until enough people give up on ublock and just buy YT Premium that Google chalks it up to a win and stops for a while.
I'm kind of worried this will burn the devs out. Not sure how much work this would be for all of them. Sounds pretty stressful though.
Have done similar projects and can confirm. It's not mentally sustainable.
It's worth noting that it's not exactly the uBlock devs who are updating the filter lists. The people who make the filter lists are pretty separate. Then lots of adblock extensions use those same lists.
Ah that makes sense then for the update list setting they give you. Either way I hope you have less stressful projects now!
The filter list people do generally accept donations btw. If you go through the uBlock Origin list configuration, you can find links to the homepages about some of the lists. If they accept donations, I’m sure there’ll be a prominent link.
I imagine this is pretty thankless work, so if adblock has been valuable to you, you may wish to research donating.
Disclaimer that I am not socially or financially associated with any mainstream internet ad blockers or filter lists.
Apparently not even uBlock is immune
Can confirm, it sucks
I got it in ublock but used the block element feature to block it. Now I can't scroll down to comments or see the recommended vids but videos play fine.
Considering that suggested videos are all just repeats of videos you already watched and the comments are always ass I see this as an absolute win
Yeah I get repeats non stop. Wtf is the point?
I use ublock and FF across 4 devices and got a warning on one computer over the weekend.
if they get aggressive with it, it'll just reduce my YT usage. like if I really want to watch something, I'll open up a crap little chromium browser that does nothing but watch youtube videos. assuming ublock and FF don't find a way around this.
slowly rolling out andf ublock doesnt stop it (maybe soon) which sucks ass.
uBlock will block it and it will stay blocked for like an hour, and then it will be unblockable until uBlock updates again, and so on and so on. It's a contest of endurance between their devs and google's IMO.
Removed by mod
Shit's making me ready to kill myself tomorrow. No, Youtube adblock doesn't matter, most of my Youtube consumption happens on the TV app with my remote. This isn't about personally losing my bread and circuses, this is about how the best social medium we currently have is Youtube other such mediums like TikTok (don't even use it, but recognize it as extraordinarily important and innovative). But every way the ruling class forces us to change our lifestyle based on their ads borders on life ruining. Because it's not about the actual bread or the circuses, it's about elevating the bread and circuses, making them bigger and thinner than ever so we feel more satisfied but more starved.
“Enshittification” is the academic term for the phenomenon
making them bigger and thinner than ever so we feel more satisfied but more starved
That's what happened to the entire Star Wars franchise since Disney bought it: there's more of it than ever but most of it is more forgettable.
I just blocked their blocking popup with ublock's "block element" feature.
Works fine but I can't scroll down to comments or see recommended videos anymore. Loss of those features is probably an improvement though tbh.
how did u do this i tried but the rest of the site stays greyed out and can't click anything. Can you post what you have in the "My Filters" ?
This first section is an older one I had when they first started this stuff. The second one I added yesterday. They probably combine in some way, I have no idea how the first one works someone here posted it when the first wave of bullshit ages ago.
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! 2023-10-16 https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com##tp-yt-paper-dialog.ytd-popup-container.style-scope www.youtube.com##.openedawesome, thank you! Weirdly, the message is no longer popping up for me right now but i will try those if it comes back
What is their endgame?
Why do you care? The hell are you going to do about it? You're 4chan, You've been cheering on hellworld ever since you were born.
All they have to do is blame the Jews and you will be willing to DIE for the people that ruined your life, just so you can feel like you have power over something.
First paragraph could be a new site tagline
The cia need their mind control machine to make a profit
I'll tell you their plan:
Take all red blooded, meat eating, toilet shitting, masculine patriots and kill their boners with advertising to stop conservatives from procreating. All the pink haired pro World War 3 consumers will become aroused by the ads, and will eventually outbreed conservativism and American Values. Conservative men today have no choice but blow each other just a little to get hard for procreation sex with their wives
I just cam a little
I stopped watching youtube for entertainment when i got spammed with cookie thingy, although i'm a type of guy who will wait for 5 hours for torrent to download instead of paying 2 bucks.
Now i just catch up on invidious every week with pbs spacetime and wtyp 
although i'm a type of guy who will wait for 5 hours for torrent to download instead of paying 2 bucks.
as you should 
