I look at Lemmy far less than I did Reddit.
I read only one subreddit still and it is Am I The Asshole, it is very easy to spot the ads because only one add matches the format of the posts. Anything that doesn’t start with AITA is an ad.
That gives me way more time to read books that I have been putting off. Starting with a few books by Cory Doctorow who coined that term enshittification.
It is a lot easier to make time for reading when watching a video will mean an ad before, during, and after every 5 minute clip. I subscribe to a few news shows so I can listen to them as podcasts while I work to support without having ads.
Maybe this is why I’ve been so ready to fully embrace Lemmy for my internetting. It’s the opposite of enshittified, as FOSS often is.
I’ll admit though, I pay for YouTube and get more bang for the buck than any other money I spend on entertainment. I’ve had it for a while though, and did not sign up because of their renewed war on ad blocking. Plus it’s nice that the creators get paid from my view, even though it’s not much.
Direct revenue is logically a better model for creators, but I don’t like that the share of youtube premium revenue is determined by a black box. If it’s distributed according to my total monthly watch time, how can anyone say for sure whether the direct revenue split for a given channel => potential advertising revenue had I watched without premium or adblock? I don’t think even creators could tell you based on the analytics available to them via Youtube.
I canceled and set up memberships on a few channels instead. That way I actually get something out of it (member perks), and I know that at least my favourite creators get 70% of those amounts. Also, sponsorblock
Web 2.0 desperately clinging to life. FOSS self hosted web is the future. Internet speeds are fast enough on home networks that self hosting is perfectly viable for essentially everything, and for the few things that can’t be self hosted by just anyone, FOSS alternatives and work arounds to existing paid services exist.
Internet is becoming harder to monopolize, and increasing amounts of power and control are being handed back to the working class online. FOSS has become a movement that has grown exponentially over the last few years.
Their next recourse will be attempting to make jail time a thing for piracy. Both for hosting it and downloading it.
There’s certainly a bubble bursting. You only have to look at all the layoffs.fyi since COVID. I’m just hoping it’s happening in a slow enough way that it’s not going to take more legitimate companies with it.
AI is the next bubble. It will hit a brick wall either legally or just on functionality (maybe both). I can see uses for targeted models, bespoke to a use case, but training those is too expensive right now. General models are just toys IMHO. Unfortunately it’s going to get a few years for everyone to realise.
The brick wall on AI is not functionality. It’s cost of running the neural networks. It’s simply not financially realistic to integrate ChatGPT into everything.
You are going to train the AI that replaces you. They aren’t going to tell you that though. I’m starting comprehensive plans so that any future work I do can’t be fed into AI. Making hardware that just dumps random input when I’m not using it. Isolating and containing any human input that does happen. Distributing my work across as many devices as possible to only give each it’s single app use worth of data.
It does seem like FLOSS is experiencing a renaissance due to rampant commercialization of the web
Some one will say something offensive or a slight threat and the government will charge you for a crime like you did it.
They want the Internet to be HR speak only.
It’s not so simple. I’ve been trying to go the foss self-hosted way, as well as help p2p projects, and I got stuck because I’m behind a cgnat, unable to forward ports, and my shitty isp has no ipv6. I can’t afford vpns at the moment, so I got stuck. Besides, all that needed a lot of tech skills most people won’t have. This is a serious barrier of entry for a lot of people.
I just don’t look at it if I have to make an account.
Which is 100% fine by them.
They’ve created a situation where we HAVE to use ad-blockers for security, so they instead have to sell our data.
If they can’t make money off ads OR selling our data AND we won’t pay to view the content, all we’re really doing is using up their bandwidth.
You’re missing nothing on Instagram.
My thought exactly, and I don’t feel like missing out either
Same. Those sites simply don’t exist to me. If it’s so important that I see it, then copy/paste the content.
It’s like they’re trying to show you a party that’s going on in some private location, but you don’t get in, because you don’t have an account. Well then, they say, if the account is free and you still don’t make it, it’s not our fault. So they close you out.
You telling them to “just copy and paste the content” is like telling them to send you a photo/video of the party. It’s not the same as being there.
Right? If your message is important, then set it free. If it’s not, then I’m not gonna care.
Yep, whenever people text me an Instagram or TikTok URL, I just scroll past it. I don’t even bother to find out what it’s supposed to be about, it’s completely inconsequential to me.
It’s actually making me go outside
I’m disgusted XD
The browser in my computer at work doesn’t have an ad blocker. I haven’t installed one because I most of the time I’m using it to access our intranet. But when I do happen to use the internet, damn are there so many ads! They literally block the content I’m trying to read, and come back even when I try to close it.
All that to say, due to enshittification I will forever keep my ad blocker on my personal computer.
Can’t imagine what the web is like outside of ublock origin…
The few websites I see on pcs by clients are essentially state backed so they don’t have ads as well.Scary world I am not eager to experience.
It’s almost as though the overbearing Yahoo/Ask! toolbars that used to plague everyone’s Internet Explorer back in the day have mutated and infected the internet at large. Now most websites feel like one useless, giant malware-riddled toolbar.
I’m baffled when companies that self-host DNS don’t have DNS-level adblocking.
It’s because there’s websites out there that will entirely break, and for really dumb fucking reasons. I’ve seen some sites not even load due to google tag manager being blocked. Most of the time it’s a signal to me that I don’t want to have anything to do with that domain.
However, if this was at work, that would be a call to IT. Multiply that by potentially hundreds of calls on the regular, and that could get really expensive.
The better solution here I think, is to default the browser install with uBlock Origin already there. Then allow the user the power to toggle the addon to their own liking. Then last, train your employees to know what the addon is, and how to use it.
Then it’s the best of both worlds: websites aren’t necessarily breaking for all users, ads are absent as a default state, and users are empowered to control their own experience. (And yes there’s still going to be Jims and Karens calling for support, but they’re going to regardless, those types will always find a reason.)
I’ve come to the same terms.
other day I decided to open reddit.com and noticed that almost every other (re)post was from a bot. even the top comments were from bots.
since then I’ve added reddit to my growing blocklist.I now spend more time on feeder, an RSS reader app.
I haven’t been to reddit much since the api fiasco. If it’s not too much trouble can you point me to some obvious bots so i can get a feel for what that looks like?
here’s one i got on r/all:
I didn’t scroll further or opened comment section because I didn’t want to overwhelm my brain with ragebait.
Looks like straight up rage bait. I mean reddit was heading down that path for at least the last 5 years but that is progressively worse than last July
And you know what would fix it? Building your own website that doesn’t do those things and making the people around you engage with it instead of you capitulating to them, but why put effort into anything when you can sit around and complain about it and do nothing about it?
…YouTube makes a loss. Huge one. with all these irritating practices. Google can foot that bill. Can OP seriously foot this one?
Do you think it’s expensive to host your own personal website with your own content on it or are you just that damn stupid?
Yes. When the site’s a YouTube competitor, yes.
Then you clearly are that damn stupid because that’s not what a personal website is.
🤦🤦🤦
Capitalism does this to itself due to the profit motive. Where once is innovation and brand new disruption becomes petty iteration as this new frontier slowly but surely becomes a well-oiled profit machine. The upside is that FOSS makes replacing this profit-generating soul-sucking bloatware with better alternatives very easy.
Replacing the existing infrastructure of Capitalism by building up parallel structures is a valid means of weakening Capital itself.
Really waiting for an youtube alternative tbh.
PeerTube! If you just want a better YouTube, check out NewPipe.
Already use Newpipe, might give Peertube a chance tho.
You definitely should if you want a viable alternative!
Freetube
Bypass Paywalls Clean
Hahaha good edit. Could you imagine?!
(Checks for myself)
…Oh…
It’s sensible that maintaining a current up to date dictionary is worthy of compensation, but I think the tragedy is that such endeavors as “maintaining current information on human language” aren’t just publicly funded, so here they are panhandling for “Dictionary plus” lol.
I’m surprised people still use commercial dictionaries when Wiktionary exists. Is there a reason more people don’t use it?
If you’re using Safari on macOS or iOS, download Vinegar for YouTube (and Baking Soda for other websites). It switches videos to the native player and skips ads (and autoplay). It also sets the quality to whatever you prefer (Best, in my case). Makes mobile YouTube so much better.
Cornerstones of the internet:
- social media
- content sharing (video, audio media)
- websites
Internet resources ruined by ads/corporate greed:
- social media (full of ads, borderline unusable without ad block)
- content sharing (account sharing blocks (Netflix) war on adblockers (YouTube) etc)
- e-mail (spam)
- websites (ads, borderline unusable with adblockers, refuses to load with adblockers)
gg everyone. Time to reinvent everything.
So true. I’d like to add that also because of ads, social media and other websites are full of nonsense clickbait content, and every part of the user experience is designed to keep you scrolling through said content. Even with an adblocker, it’s like wading through a swamp to find anything actually worth looking for. (Of course, there are still websites with no ads, and even the ones with ads aren’t always horrible. But generally, shit sucks.)
I’m not internet god, but I have a possible first step forward with a protocol and working implementation ;
Decentralized websites, encrypted and takedown safe. Free, FOSS and based on reciprocal sharing. Nothing very complicated, you need to forward a port and run a program.
I’m just a geek though, not a manager or marketing person so I’d love some people checking it out.
Valmond
What I don’t get is how most places, people get mad at us for not being able to read an article due to the paywall. I mean, I’m not going to subscribe to 50 shitty news sites just so I can read someone’s damn random shit.
Agreed. It is urgent that we teach Neil Postman’s “media ecology”. The junk noise garbage shit Internet sucks, and enough is enough!
