Equally, how to get around geoblocking on YouTube without a VPN
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When they pry them from my cold, dead hands! Seriously, i can’t read novels on a screen. I’ve tried. It just loses the immersion for me.
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A response to Cory’s latest enshittification talk:
The image:
The talk (repost from above):
(h/t @orenwolf’s mastodon.)
(PS, wonder if we can do anything to improve those Masto embeds…)
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you have reduced my support for the EFF and i may never be able to support them again
I only read the (horrible) transcript, but I don’t see anything objectionable to someone that really supports the EFF. It’s all pretty obvious to anyone that’s been paying attention, just laid out in one place.
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larp as something else, u pebkac fuck
Gotta admire this person’s talent for novel insults, though.
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Yeah, I think it’s 120% likely this person has never given EFF a cent.
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I get that they want to limit the non-compostable stuff from going in there, but it seems like there has to be a better way to filter out that stuff than an app. In some ways this is worse than what the city did in my neighborhood. They took out most public trashcans because people were using them too much.
Given the icloud email address and the iphone rant to sign off (even using the corporate cAmelcAse), I take it that this angry person has invested way too much of their identity into being a consumer of the Cupertino walled garden, and is viscerally threatened at the suggestion that this may not have been the best of ideas.
In order to be shocked at Cory’s take on this, they would have had to ignore the last decade and a half of his writing on Enshittification, monopolies, and the war on general purpose computing.
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Lede buried beneath the one box: Google needs to Google Streisand.
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At the time of Henson’s death, he was negotiating with Michael Eisner, then the head of Disney, about selling the Muppets. “Eisner was trying to get Sesame Street, too, which Jim wouldn’t allow. But Jim was not a dealer, he was an artist, and it was destroying him, it really was,” says Oz.
Disney finally managed to buy the Muppets – but not Sesame Street – in 2004, and to Oz’s mind, there’s a “demarcation line between the Jim Henson Muppets and the Disney Muppets”: “There’s an inability for corporate America to understand the value of something they bought. They never understood, with us, it’s not just about the puppets, it’s about the performers who love each other and have worked together for many years.”
Oz hasn’t worked with the Muppets since 2007, and I assumed he’d retired. I assumed incorrectly: “I’d love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn’t want me, and Sesame Street hasn’t asked me for 10 years. They don’t want me because I won’t follow orders and I won’t do the kind of Muppets they believe in,” he says.
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So, is blocking ad-blockers the real enshittification or YouTube’s having ads in the first place? This is one of those situations where I’m curious about what it means to be enshittified. Because ads bring in money that keeps the service going, regardless of how people feel about ads. Now if the ads are particularly intrusive or ruin the video experience mid-video (I honestly don’t know because I haven’t had YouTube ads for years now), that’s shitty. But I’m curious about enshittification vs sustainability.
Enshittification is a process, not a moment. It’s not the event of YouTube adding ads to videos, or adding ads within videos, or making the ads more intrusive, or blocking ad blockers. Rather it’s the reality that these events will keep happening as the capitalist enterprise strives to extract more profit from consumers at all costs. Enshittification is the creeping worse-ness of products that emerges from the endless pursuit of maximum revenue for minimum cost.
Of course, a product doesn’t have to be the property of a capitalist enterprise to suffer from enshittification. Any organization that is forced to operate under the violence of capitalism essentially has to do capitalism cosplay in order to stay afloat, so it too ends up participating in enshittification (or getting violently enshittified at the hands of some capitalist lackey). Take a look at, say, the education sector.
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Thank you for clarifying. That makes perfect sense to me. It’s not necessarily intentional but rather a result of the “force of nature” effect of capitalism as it ruins things in its wake
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To elaborate your point, Enshittification is the process that emerges when creators and viewers don’t have a viable alternative to YouTube.
- Ramping up adverts is enshit, because viewers can’t jump to not-Youtube.
- Ramping down revenue for creators is enshit, because they can’t jump to a venue that pays better.
- Charging advertisers more per view is enshit…
In a healthy system “making the system worse” is balanced by “people will leave”. So in the management meeting where someone says “we can turn up the ads to increase revenue” someone else says “they’ll go to $competitor”.
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There comes a time in every app, website, or even game’s life where it works about as well as it should. Unfortunately, due to the way society is, the question then asked is: ‘how do we make more money?’ We’ve all seen it. Weird bells and whistles added to perfectly functioning services that take away more than they add.
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“On what planet would I ever want this information to be shared with friends on family on an OPT OUT basis?”
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