Where do they get the money from?
I don’t think that’s entirely true. Or at least not in the longer term view of it. YT isn’t just some random store that doesn’t want to deal with an unruly customer. It’s a big tech monopoly platform. Like the other tech giants, their strategy has always hinged on becoming the only game in town. And they predictably use the same tactics monopolies have been using for the past century:
Offer the product at such a low price that you take a loss and use your hoard of money to outlast would-be competitors who don’t have a massive pot of money to burn. In YT/Google terms this is the fact that it’s a free site and up until very recently they’ve done little to nothing about adblocking users despite being one of the biggest tech companies in the world, knowing it is happening, (It was in their chrome extensions search, plus they don’t pay the creators for the no-ad views.) and having the capability to stop it at least for their browser, which a lot of people were already using. Why not go to war with adblockers sooner when their entire business is built on advertising? Because that’s the cost they were willing to bear to turn YT into a monopoly. They could take the hit on not getting ad revenue from some users, but some hypothetical competitor certainly couldn’t.
Make switching hard. A site that’s grown as large as YT has massive network effects. For viewers, that’s where all the videos are. For creators that’s where all the viewers are. For both that’s where there is enough of a community that there are lively discussions in comments. Nobody outside nerds like us is going to some external site they’ve never heard of. If you want to get your stuff out there, you use YT. Then there are things like creator contracts to further discourage switching.
Ad block users aren’t valueless to YT, or at least they weren’t. They were a portion of those viewers and commenters that contributed to YT becoming THE video social media site. They comment, share videos around, maybe even contribute directly to creators to allow them to keep making YT video. You maybe lose a out on a couple cents from the lost ad views for each one of them, but the value of the network effect gained by keeping them around this long far outweighs that loss.
EDIT: Oh and how could I forget: They get data from you. Sure, they can’t directly sell ads for you off that data, but the more data they have in general, the better they are able to make predictions about other similar users, which is valuable.
They’re doing this now because they can. They no longer have meaningful competition to kill off. The few that kinda cross into their market are also massive tech platform monopolies that are currently engaged in the exact same thing. They can’t expand their customer base anymore, so now they’re extracting more money from the captive audience they have.
And it’s not just adblock users they’re increasing the “price” for. YT has added an insane number of ads to their videos and increased the price of YT Premium. If adblockers died tomorrow, they wouldn’t be like “What a relief, now that we’ve gotten rid of the freeloaders, we can finally lower our prices for everyone since they aren’t bearing the burden of the non-payers.” They just get to tighten the screws even further because they would have gained an even more dominant position over their users.
In a fairer world, we’d all pay a reasonable amount for the things we use or move on to an alternative if we’d rather not. But we don’t live in that world. We live in capitalist hell world where everything is a monopoly and the government is so captured by those corporate interests that they basically never enforce even the meager anti-trust laws we do have.
It feels telling of corporate media that they chose to frame the company under suspicion of fraud complaining about the government investigation ruining their profits as a “warning.” As though they’re experts reporting on their predictions about a natural phenomenon or a policy proposal and not… you know… the criminals crying foul.
I figured it just made sense to lean into it once I realized what it was. I didn’t go FULL murder hobo, but I ended up doing enough to trigger a bunch of special quest stuff unique to the Dark Urge. I still think this was probably better as a 2nd play through, but I was pretty satisfied with all the content the game had to fill the gaps caused by me… suddenly cutting off some quest lines.
I’ve been playing the Cyberpunk DLC and just finished that last night. Aside from some annoying bugs that was pretty fun.
I’m nearing the end of my first BG 3 playthrough that I’ve been streaming with a friend. We decided to go Dark Urge and it’s made this kind of a weird first playthrough. It’s been fun but I think in hindsight it would have been better to have a more normal first run then go back for this. Also, found a kind of funny bug (?) in the vampire boss fight. The boss has some property that says he can’t be moved by physical or magical means. But when I threw that legendary spear that has a knock back AoE, it sent him off the cliff and that was the fight aside from mopping up the ads.
Aside from that I’m always playing TFT occasionally. I climbed higher than I ever did before: 200 LP masters before I hit another funk and started backsliding.
I was playing the new DLC recently and I encountered some brand new bugs that I didn’t see on my first playthrough. Sometimes after completing a quest, the game would just lock me out of certain features like the map, journal, inventory, phone, etc. only way to fix it was to reload.
Users who don’t directly pay for a social service where user content and interaction is the business are still valuable. They share videos around, they comment, they contribute to it being the place where everything is happening. There’s a reason all these tech platform companies spent so long in the honeymoon phase of monopolization. Without the network effect of people on their platform, they have nothing.
They still need a way to overall make profit from their users, but they aren’t losing nothing by losing people who adblock.
Biden, and any US president, is pro-military industrial complex. Anything that lets them sell more weapons and increase US hegemony is what their ideology is.
Oppressive systems passively inflict violence on the oppressed. Artificial lack of access to basic necessities like food, shelter, healthcare hurts or even kills people. Getting over policed gets people hurt or killed.
The absence of war isn’t the same thing as the absence of conflict. The conflict is built into the structure of a hierarchical society. It’s just only felt by some. A war brings the conflict to the surface to make those who the system supports feel the pain of those who it does not.
The government could give in and create a more just society for everyone and the conflict would be resolved. The oppressed giving in only benefits those in power. They go back to passively experiencing systemic violence.
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Submitting to an oppressive government is not peace.
One of these “sides” could unilaterally peacefully end the conflict. For the other side choosing “peace” just means submitting to living under an occupying force as eternal second class citizens. insert mlk quote here.
They’ll stop updating the game whenever the Attack on Titan anime actually ends.
It’s crazy how successful they’ve been off just making and selling a good indie game. They’re still doing free updates AND they can afford a $200k donation?
The prisoner’s dilemma assumes an inability to collude and strong incentives for defecting from any potential collusion arrangements.
Moderators are free to talk to and work with each other and there’s no particular incentives to compete over. Everyone is here for good discussion. There aren’t any ads or anything at the moment right? So why not just agree on cooperation? I don’t see the problem here.
In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.
In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.
Eh, the way it was written I wouldn’t have read it as sarcasm. Text and tone yada yada. That said, I’ve definitely seen people who seriously think like this.
Fair enough. It’s hard to watch them objectively without thinking about what we’re missing. What confuses me though is they new shows lean HEAVILY on nostalgia, suggesting that they’d be trying to get the audience that has nostalgia for it, but the rest of what makes up the shows isn’t anything like what made people originally enjoy Star Trek.
I was initially turned off from it too because of the awkward comedy early on. But I have it another go and ended up enjoying it as an extension of Star Trek.
The vibe I get is he wanted to make a Star Trek show, but since he’s that comedy guy he probably got it greenlit as a comedy and then just slowly morphed into just Star Trek while the producers weren’t looking. I’m basing this on nothing, it’s just a funny head cannon.
It’s not a stretch to say it’s the only thing of this era that picks up the legacy of TNG trek. Lower decks is fun but too short to really do what full episodes could and while Strange New Worlds is ok… it still doesn’t feel in the spirit that I’m looking for.
Removing humans from your side of the war lowers the cost of going to war and allows for even more centralized power. It’s a lot easier to do morally bankrupt acts if you don’t need to convinced a group of human soldiers to do it. Clearly you can anyway a lot of the time, but going for the robots is a lot cheaper/less risky.
It’s pretty obvious why powerful people would want this and why it would be terrible for the rest of us even without worrying about a hypothetical sky net future.