Sphere

The simple fact is that YouTube just isn’t good enough to pay the amount of money for that Google wants for it. Accordingly, if other ways to use it besides premium aren’t available, I’ll stop using it and recover some time in my day.

Rooftop gardens and semi open high floor shared areas are possible… Not necessarily a huge amount of space, but I’ve seen it work. Just need the apartment building to be built with a decent budget.

Perhaps it’s unfair to people who want to have kids but can’t that IVF is so expensive, but really, there’s one thing that affects birth rate more than anything else: cost of housing with decent nearby amenities, infrastructure etc. If housing were cheaper, people would have more kids… Simple.

So if you want to solve the social equity problem, subsidize IVF. If you want the birth rate to increase, knock down the barriers to entry and high costs in the housing market.

Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.

I always just turn DRM off and don’t subscribe to these things… Now I know I had a better reason than I thought I did.

deleted by creator

Surprised it’s not zero already honestly.

It’s times like these when I’m glad I refused to even log into Google to view YouTube, let alone buy subscriptions. I also refuse to view downloading content (without logging in) that’s freely available to be viewed as piracy.

These subscriptions are undoubtedly a rip-off. For those saying creators get a “cut”, there’s a reason why sites like Patreon exist. It’s substantially better for creators if you subscribe to them directly that way and get your videos from Patreon. Same with Nebula etc. If I really had to pay then I’d do that (and do already for some stuff that was never on YouTube anyway).

You can get enough subs for the price of a YT premium to get plenty of content to watch, even if you don’t want to subvert Google. So there’s zero reason to throw money at them for this. None at all.

The alternative exists, but it costs money. Most big YouTuber accounts (at least the ones I’m subscribed to) post on either Nebula, Patreon or some platform like that. It would cost quite a lot to subscribe to them all, but still less than YouTube premium in my country. So in the worst case scenario where YouTube really blocks all ad free interfaces except paid use, that’s my answer. I don’t like it as I think a lot of the content is overpriced for what it is, but it’s better than having $$$ swallowed up by some mega corporation that is just interested in screwing authors and viewers over as much as possible.

Web environment integrity is a non-starter because it offers avenues for bad actors to enforce “integrity” that forces malware to be loaded as well as legitimate page elements. However, that doesn’t mean Google won’t keep trying to stop ad blockers, alternative interfaces etc in the future.

Maybe this explains why the result quality is so terrible. I’ve found Brave Search to be surprisingly good, and even the likes of Metager/Mojeek to be better than they used to be relative to the big players. DDG is not too bad, but went noticeably downhill when Bing started introducing AI features - presumably since these are largely not included in DDG, the remaining original search mechanisms aren’t as good.

I really feel like we’ll be back to starting web rings and distributing bookmark files etc soon though. Relying more on community resources than faceless companies that will undoubtedly be looking for the next way to screw us over.

Handing it to LibreOffice or Abiword I guess. Or for cloud fans, Google Docs. I don’t think anyone is going to go without a word processor because of this.

Or you could make public transport run faster and more efficiently and faster, reducing the number of people who drive.