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Fuckin’ A on this one. Think about how much companies make with entirely artificial scarcity. You can only add 1 license to this, you can only watch on one TV unless you pay us $15 a month. It costs $200 to change where you are in the database table for this flight. Complete bullshit and we need to see it for what it is and stop it. I love how she says all that will be left in their wake is dull capitalists. Exactly. Stop playing their games. Play your game.
Line must go 🆙
NewPipe is great on my phone, SmartTube for my TV. I tried showing others but it’s like they don’t think that there is a problem. I use Arch btw.
FreeTube is pretty good as well. Using it on Debian (or Mint).
+1 to FreeTube. It just sucks that all these players typically use the same YouTube.js lib. So when google fucks with that lib (because they definitely cat-and-mouse that shit), it breaks so many.
That’s my fear as well. Google breaks literally everything they touch.
100%.
SponsorBlock on SmartTube is incredible. Saved so much time
Does anyone know something not terribly complicated for blocking YouTube ads on Xbox one? We don’t have a smart tv and the ads are infuriating when I remember they exist
Stop using Discord if you care for the internet. Seriously, Discord is the internet but privatized. It’s the precursor of the future of the internet that capitalists want. Access only available if you login. Search is useless for anything older than a week. Data not accessible to search engines, even on public servers. Need to use their bloated (web)app. Charges for basic functions. Stop 👏 using👏 Discord👏 What is wrong with good old forums.
And Twitter is going the same direction as Discord.
deleted by creator
But now many projects put their community on a server discord. The information isn’t indexed since it is private, so if you search for the same issue that was solved on the discord channel, you won’t find any answer.
That is not really a Discord problem, but a project problem.
I simply refuse to use any project that uses discord as their knowledge base.
Especially stop using Discord as a support forum for your software project. That’s the most daft thing ever conceived.
GitHub is a great place for this. They have an Issues and Discussions tab for repos. Zero reason to use Discord if you use GitHub already for your project.
does Codeberg have these features? if the jump to free internet is going to be made, do it all in one trip.
Personally I’m ok with discord for private social communication, imo not everything needs to be archived or searchable. But there’s people/devs who use discord as a knowledge repository and that’s the recipe for disaster imo.
The recipe: Old problem questions, solutions, how to guides, … All hidden behind a login wall and if you do get in, then you still have to contend with the crappy search engine, so you might just as well ask the probably already answered question yet again. And one day it’s probably all going poof or behind some kind of paywall. Basically also what quora has been trying to do for years, but I don’t think any people with more than a few braincells complain about quora being hard to access, since most of their content stinks anyhow.
yeah this is mostly my gripe with discord. Many groups, especially game dev groups, use it to share knowledge with the public, yet that knowledge quickly becomes buried and virtually inaccessible.
I don’t like discord, but it is a MASSIVE improvement over all the meta-garbage. Stop using Facebook, instagram, whatsapp and really also twitter first. Discord is the smaller evil compared to those.
Yes forums have their application and are better than discord for a lot of things, but discord is really more a competitor to IRC-chats with a focus on life discussion, rather than long-living content. And it isn’t discords fault if some people completely misuse it as something that it really isn’t trying to be.
Need to use their bloated (web)app.
Which means that it works in a regular browser, which is so much better than a lot of other infrastructure that is increasingly mobile-app only.
Charges for basic functions.
Does it though? It charges for certain emojis and the like, but that is honestly a MUCH more healthy business model than what a lot of other places on the internet are doing. And if you just want to use it as intended, you really aren’t missing out on anything.
I’m really not saying that it is great, but I wonder whether some of the people ranting about this may get signal boosted by meta to distract from their even worse cesspool…
eh, discord started catering to people using it as a forum, so they are actively making the problem worse…
they introduced pseudo-forum channels where messages are grouped into threads, like a traditional forum…of course not indexed, and with their signature terrible “last message first” sorting, and terrible UI that doesn’t do any of the things a forum is supposed to be good at…
so yeah, discord absolutely belongs to the other awful internet diseases you mentioned, it’s not an exception…
I use a “jump to top” plugin specifically to make discord threads more usable. I’d still rather use an actual forum or even reddit over these poorly implemented features.
People deciding to use threads as forums is not Discord’s fault.
I get that it’s stealing your data, what I don’t get is why it has to be accessible by search engines. First of all, most servers are private because they would rather be that way, they don’t want anyone joining or viewing the content. Second of all, the big search engines would have had the ability to gather all the available data and train AIs, give it to advertisers etc. I don’t want that. I don’t know what the Chinese are doing with the data, but I know what Google and Bing would be doing with it. Not everything on the internet has to be available to everyone, a lot of people want privacy. I get that ideally there shouldn’t be accounts with personal information required, but the rest I don’t agree with. Reddit and twitter are meant to be public, everyone on such social media is aware that anyone can see their comments and posts. But discord serves another purpose, it’s for private, closed communities.
I also don’t see what basic feature is charged. Everything charged has to do with functions that require a lot of storage/server space or stupid stickers and emojis. None of that is a basic feature and for the former I get why someone would charge.
I am not defending discord, I’d rather not use it, I know it aggressively steals our data and they probably plan on enshittifying it a lot more once they’ve taken out the competition completely, but that criticism I mentioned is not valid imo.
you shouldn’t use it because it’s a black hole for information.
anything out on discord should be treated as deleted, because it inevitably will disappear one day, with no hope of recovery.
when a public forum is indexable that means that projects like archive.org and wayback machine can save the contents, even if the site itself disappears some day, meaning the information is preserved for future generations.
communities use discord way more than they should, and all that those communities create is effectively non-existent. most of it is already as good as gone.
think of modding communities, which are by far the worst offenders when it comes to discord: not only are way too many mods hosted on discord itself, way too many communities are only sort-of indexed through discord, meaning the links to where the actual files are hosted can only be accessed through discord. so even if the files survive the inevitable purge, they are lost anyways.
so many communities have already just… disappeared without warning, because the server got nuked for one reason or another, often completely idiotic reasons. and all the knowledge stored on those is gone. forever.
that’s why discord is insanely bad for the internet as a whole, but for data driven communities especially.
it would be fine if people only used it for what it was meant to do, chatting, but misusing it as a forum is where the problems begin.
it gets even worse when people insist on using it as a support channel: questions and answers are constantly buried and impossible to find, search engines can’t show you the contents, so you don’t even know that your problems even have answers, questions are constantly repeated over and over, even though they’ve already been answered, and on and on the list goes.
discord is bad for communities. it is destructive. it is insanely divisive!
there’s a trend for every single creator/author to have their own server!
so instead of having one big community, where users can easily find information and content, and creators can easily exchange ideas and concepts, you get tiny splinters that either don’t talk to each other, or don’t even realize they exist at all!
and all of that is completely hidden behind opaque “search” and “discover” algorithms that only serve what discord itself thinks the user wants.
it’s top to bottom terrible for communities, but people flock to it anyways, for all the wrong reasons.
discord is the bane of online social groups!
and the worst part is: you are absolutely FORCED to use it, because damn near everyone uses it! and there’s no alternative way to access it, you HAVE to use it! that alone should set off alarm bells!
I would dump discord the second I can get somewhere I can do voice coms and stream my screen with my friends. That is the only thing I use it for anyway.
“Why are you still using it?” Buddy I don’t want either but it’s the old story of “most people are using it”, plus it’s one of my ways to cope with loneless.
I suspect Discord will die within months, till then I’ll keep using it…
Yes I understand the irony of that statement.
I agree with everything you said except search. I’ve found search to be pretty good. Yesterday I found my comment from 3 years ago on a server.
It’s crazy how little the younger generation knows about torrenting. With my younger brothwr and his friend we couldn’t find a movie in any of the streaming services and I told them I would download it in less than 5 minutes, they didn’t understand how that was possible but were impressed when I did it. We need to keep the art alive
Hilariously, if the corporations could have curtailed their greed for a few more years - piracy could have sufficiently reduced in popularity and need to the point that it would have largely become a ‘lost art’.
Alas, chasing ever higher returns because “line must go up” is just introducing a new generation to these old tried and true methods.
Not generational, that’s niche stuff. The basic issue is exactly the same from 30 years ago.
Probably right, I just felt like there were more people that were at least aware of it
I say this as a creator; it is not stealing to take something that can be replicated infinitely without cost.
It can be reproduced indefinitely without cost to the creator. It’s the first production that’s a bitch.
How is initial production funded if nobody is willing to pay for it?
If it were fairly funded it would be easier to find the money. Because right now tickets and subscriptions are most expensive ever yet just a few months ago US writers had to go on a long strike. If execs and “stars” stopped taking astronomical amounts of money then the production costs would probably go down.
Up front through things like kickstarter? instead of convincing a publisher to sign you on you have to convince a crowd
Artists will create art regardless of whether they are paid for it.
In any case, sale of physical media and merchandising will earn plenty to fund production.
I wonder if there is a word for that
If you can’t pirate it, it’s not worth the money to rent it
I only disagree when it comes to paying creators for their content. I pay for a single streaming service, and that’s just because it directly supports the people running the service and making the content.
I’m more than happy to pay creators more or less directly for content, but I’m definitely not supporting shit services like Hulu and Netflix.
I pay for a single streaming service, and that’s just because it directly supports the people running the service and making the content.
Nebula?
Dropout.tv would be my guess
You would be correct
Slippi was right, I pay for dropout.tv. It’s an amazing platform that basically rose from the ashes of college humor. If you like their style of humor, they have a bunch of new shows and tons of D&D-like content. Easiest $5/mo I spend.
I’m so excited for season 2 of Misfits and Magic coming out tonight
Me and my partners are still working through NSBU, but I can’t recall if we’ve seen season 1. So much content and so little time!
Enjoy watching as it comes out!
Season 1 is only 5 episodes of actual play, so it’s a fairly quick watch.
Never Stop Blowing Up was a great season, you’re in for a great time. I highly recommend watching the Adventuring Party, generally, and especially for NSBU.
We have been, and it’s sooopoo good. Also nice to see some BTS stuff and characters progressing. My partners don’t always like watching the adventuring party, but I enjoy them.
I think that’s fair, I do think AP got way better once they started recording after the episode they were for compared to when they used to record them after the season was over.
Dropout for me
this post is 100% right, anyway stop buying phones, you don’t need them.
I wish to go even further.
Remember when the internet was prviate, anonymous, cool, and had more than three websites?
Egads, I long for those days.
Also work on not being such a dopamine hound. I don’t need to see new-show this year. Or this decade. I’ll see it eventually. Or never. Who cares.
Know what’s as good as music? The wind in the trees.
Not saying I’m some ascetic who doesn’t enjoy media, but when I hit a paywall or an adwall I just try to say “ok, see ya later” and move on letting that content desire slip from my mind.
This is great advice. There’s so much content to enjoy from the past 20+ years that I don’t feel the desire to immediately buy the new thing. You can usually get it for far cheaper down the line.
There are communities such as PatientGamers for videogames that preach exactly this.
Downvotes from stimulation hounds lol.
What if someone other than me knows what baby Yoda is up to?
To repeat, I’m not saying I perfectly succeed at this.
“If you can’t pirate it.”
That’s a skill issue.
git gud
I’m so glad that after signing up, Lemmy quickly showcased to me posts about opensource/ public alternatives for the apps/websites we normally use. It brings me such a reignited passion. In time I’m gonna change my email, cloud services, OS… Everything!
Wish I could get my dad to get this. I tell him I use an adblocker, he says why? He’s never been bothered by it. His generation grew up in a technologically inconvenient time that he now glorifies today’s streaming services, not seeing how they are enshittified. It’s sad and I wish I could get him to understand.
In fairness, this streaming world is a marvel - if you can afford it. You can, for £100 a month, have access to damn near any piece of media that’s been published over the past 100 years. If you watch ten movies in a month you’ve spent the equivalent of buying ten DVDs ten years ago. Everything beyond that is pure profit.
But if you don’t have a spare £100 a month, you can get fucked. You can spend your time feeling like you’re missing out because you can’t afford Disney+ this month, and you’re trying desperately to avoid spoilers of the tentpole show they’ve just dropped.
Our parents (generally) can afford it, and can compare it to how it used to be. Hell, I’m 44 and I still see it as an incredible feat. But it’s one I’m tired of. So I pirate the few things that have piqued my interest, and browse my friend’s well stocked Plex library for other distractions. My sole subscription is Apple Music. I could pirate music and only ever use my iPod, but there are times when I prefer the convenience of my phone.
As for the ads: I’m British, so can only speak for times I visited the US as a kid; but TV advertising has long been WAY out of control over there. Ads, opening credits, ads, part one, ads, part two, ads, closing credits, ads. It’s fucking insane. Here in the UK, if you’re not watching BBC, it’s ads, part one, ads, part two, ads. Done. So from our perspective, advertising on the internet is mad. But to older Gen X/Boomer Americans, it’s just a way of life.
My kids get upset when I tell them that any particular piece of media (I’m SO TIRED of certain Disney movies) isn’t available. They have quite literally tens of thousands of choices that I never had growing up with broadcast TV only.
I recently setup magnetico and tuned its crawling to not be super disruptive to my network (ISP’s shitty router doesn’t have enough RAM to maintain a stateful firewall for NAT for all the sockets magnetico likes to open).
And slowly, I’ve been accumulating torrent hashes. In a couple of months, I’m up to 118k+. I’ve considered trying to merge in other people’s magnetico databases. The point is to maintain my own search for torrents to avoid the the whack-a-mole that stupid governments play with torrent search sites.
A buddy of mine swears by usenet and uses a pretty cheap option for access.
All of that said about piracy: Support creators in your life. Cut off parasites.
Oh, dear child, you have already succumbed, you’re part of the machine, and you don’t even know it. 😔 “This form of the Internet” == you are a consumer, passively ingesting the content created by the few, big players who gatekeep the marketplace of ideas. This is the Internet the capitalists want; you’re just grousing about the details of paying for it.
The old promise of revolutionary change on the Internet was the idea that it would be an all-to-all media, that the users would create the content, and shape the message. So if you want to fight what the Internet is becoming, stop fighting the capitalists on their own turf. They don’t care if some people pirate their stuff, as long as the money rolls in from the masses.
The best the can possibly happen if you teach everybody to pirate is to destroy the funding for content creation. Then all that will be left is the propaganda, the political ads, the messages pushed by somebody for ulterior motives. Unless…
Unless we teach the children to break that paradigm altogether. A person can live a happy life without any Hulu shows, or YouTube algorithms, or AAA games. Really. Become the creators. Leave the corporate walled gardens for the open, peer-to-peer Internet.
Or don’t. It’s hard, I know. Just don’t pretend that your Jellyfin server means you’ve broken free of the system.
Nothing personal, but the way you put things comes across as quite sensationalist and “holier than though”, mixed in with a bunch of claims that aren’t well substantiated, but simply stated as fact. I feel like if you truly cared or believed in what you were saying you wouldn’t package it in this sort of (frankly arrogant) manner.
You see it a lot here. Lofty words that sound nice but are just pulled out of the commenters ass. People love the smell of their own farts I swear.
Sometimes I write just for the fun of it, not trying to convince anybody. In this case, I was just matching the tone of the meme text.
Your comments are art.
Here’s the problem: the alternative is ads, and I don’t think the ad model is sustainable.
I don’t think the ad model is sustainable.
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2024 was $49.235B, a 15.34% increase year-over-year. Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2024 was $188.261B, a 17.29% increase year-over-year. Alphabet annual gross profit for 2023 was $174.062B, a 11.13% increase from 2022. Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021. Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.They will make you pay and serve you ads, just like cable, just like cinemas, just like… Netflix
I pay for Netflix. I pay for Comcast. I pay Netflix to pay Comcast to allow me to have what I pay Netflix for in the first place.
Of course it’s not, but the alternative is not earning as much money, and the corporations can’t tolerate that. So they’ll keep juicing us for every last penny, all the while making ‘efficiency savings’ where they can.
Fuck knows what they’ll do next to make even more money, but the CEOs will have retired by then, so it’s Someone Else’s Problem.
This is the real issue. Companies/shareholders won’t accept stable profits, so they will do anything possible to increase profits. AD-free subscriptions will be a thing of the past in the next 10 years and we will be right back to cable. Bundled subscriptions with cancellation terms and ads.
I also need to also underscore that the vast majority of profits are NOT going to the people who actually create the content, so these increases are just lining the pockets of shareholders and executives.
I’m going to make a snarky old man statement. I don’t mean it in a belittling way it’s just something I do.
Start reading books, there are no ads. Reading is more difficult than watching television but boy it’s amazing when you find a great story and you just can’t put the book down.
Should we also pirate the book?
Books that are more than 15 years old? Yes.
But you usually pay for books…
I usually borrow them for free from my library
the alternative: reasonable offerings and decent service
“no it couldn’t be this, it must be ads”
I have no idea what I’m even missing out on by not paying for Discord but others are happy to pay for it, so I think that’s a pretty reasonable offering. I can’t speak for the YouTube and Tiktok example though since I don’t use those.
not much, more emojis, more stickers, more file upload, more text characters in your messages, funny reactions, nothing exciting really.
Nitro sucks with how aggressive it’s advertising is, but aside from that, it’s mostly benign.
Companies make way more money shoveling ads down our throats than they ever will from subscriptions. That’s why subscriptions services end up having ads anyway… or doing things like Netflix whos offering a cheaper subscription that serves ads.
We’ll never get companies to get away from ad revenue. It too easy of a way to make money.
