Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.
I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.
Oh yeah that too. It’s bad enough when YT does the thing where it pulls up suggested videos when you pause.
Ah yes, because what I want when I tell my computer to stop playing audio and video is for YouTube to play some audio and video of some random thing I didn’t ask for at like 3x the volume of the video I just paused. Thanks google. Such an innovative company!
I’ve tried looking into that but I couldn’t get it working. It didn’t add any subscriptions to my feed. Going to the site now I don’t even seem to be able to click on anything. I just tried disabling my ad blocker and now I can click on stuff, but none of it won’t load any videos. Any idea what’s up with it? I’d love to be able to switch off YT if I can.
It’s a pretty low bar they have to get over. And hey, they might be even better since the AI would feel the pain of their failures instead of getting a golden parachute.
They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
Satisfaction that the rich are going to get fucked by climate catastrophe and ecosystem collapse just as much as everyone else. The climate change deniers will starve just like the rest of us.
They will eventually… but in the mean time it definitely doesn’t affect them the same as the rest of us. When some places start becoming unlivable, they can just move to the ones that will last longer. When food and water becomes scarce they’ll hoard what’s left. When the air becomes unhealthy to breathe they’ll have filters. It’s gonna be a long time before they see any actual consequences they can’t buy their way out of.
Just be depressed and try to distract myself. At one point I thought I could change things by getting involved in politics. I very quickly realized how pointless that was. Of course now even my distractions also keep getting ruined. So… idk.
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.
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.
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?
…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?