Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.

Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.

And it also doesn’t work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but… it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM “for the lolz”

He is a human trafficking serial rapist. End of story. Anything else is just spewing his own propaganda to legitimize the very real hurt he does to the world.

Please, do not even pretend that a human trafficking serial rapist gives a shit about “the role of fathers in a child’s life”

A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.

If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people’s internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.

Were the ad companies interested in increased profits? Of course they were. But they also aren’t a charity. And when they are buying ad space for a web comic but having zero impressions, they are going to be pissed. They aren’t running a charity (well… some actually ARE but that is a different mess).

Again, this has been going on well before subscription models were even a thing.

That said, I do agree that it is a generational “problem”. Youtube has been around for almost 20 years and, arguably, in its current form for almost 10. Significant parts of the internet have no memory of anything else. Like, my niece and nephew literally throw tantrums when they see tv commercials when their father is watching a football game. Whereas my sister and I remember the fights over who got to use the downstairs bathroom during the second commercial break in The Simpsons that week.

But… I am an old. I remember heartfelt blog posts from some of my favorite webcomics and gaming news sites that were basically “Look. Hosting costs money. Especially as we are getting a lot more popular. I go out of my way to curate what ads we run on this site and have an inbox set up in case a company sneaks a bad one in. Please whitelist me in your ad blocker so I can keep doing this in the evenings”.

And… I dunno. It is just REALLY frustrating to watch people pretend they care about… anything all while dicking over “the little guys”. Because Google is going to get their cut. The pewdiepies of youtube will also get their cuts because they have literally been doing this for years in the form of sponsored videos. But the low/mid tier creators? They aren’t getting the massive sponsor deals (unless they want to do raid shadow legends or better help) AND are going to not be getting their ad revenue or youtube premium money because no ads were run.

Yeah…

How often do images “not load” when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.

Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive…).

And it is why the various “youtube alternatives” like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don’t have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.

And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.

I mean, it is great that you have very specific rules in terms of what kind of ads you will tolerate. You should write a letter to John Google about that.

But also? We have been through all this before. Back in the day, ads on websites were incredibly unobtrusive. A small png at the top of the page that everyone skimmed past. But people still wanted to block those because only the evil sites were sellouts who needed to pay for hosting and blah blah blah. Which more or less started the ad war we have going to today. First they were simple jpegs. Then they were animated gifs. Then they were annoying animated gifs. Then they became flash ads. Then they became flash ads about how this shitty age of empires ripoff totally has boobs. And so forth.

Because if people aren’t looking at ads? The people who buy ads know that. So we get ads that are harder to look away from. Until they are ads we can’t look away from because they are embedded in the videos themselves.

And, until we live in a post scarcity society where energy is infinite, it is going to cost money/resources to host web content. Ads are still the closest thing to an “effective” way to pay for a lot of that. And that means a war to have ads that get past ad blockers and ensure eyes get on them.

There is nowhere else. The only other companies that can consider a YouTube scale product already noped out.

I mean… that is the point.

Pay for premium, watch ads, or don’t watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.

As someone who very much “grew up” on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.

But also… I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends’, it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with “weird vibes”. Same with the people who went out of their way to “keep women out” by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.

But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents’ basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.

And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying “Fuck all y’all” and shutting it down overnight.

And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.

But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and… it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.

And… going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no “small” communities that aren’t private and spun out of larger ones.

So… I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren’t all that “good”. And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.

Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.

And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?

I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin’ A.

I can’t speak to their Password Management as I use Bitwarden for that

But I am slowly but surely migrating myself away from gmail to (my own email at my own domain routed to) Proton. The webmail is very much comparable to gmail and, if you communicate with like minded people, it has decent support for signing and even encrypting email both to other proton mail users as well as to complete randos with just a password that you can send later. My only real complaint is that (… for some really good reasons) there is no easy to use exchange server and I need to run their mail bridge to use a desktop client like Thunderbird to send and maanage and (one day) back up emails.

VPN? I switched over to this around the same time I decided I wanted to “take control” of my email and it works pretty well. Very easy to get some openvpn credentials that I can plug into whatever setup I want. And no extra fee for port forwarding unlike SOME providers. That said, my main complaint is that the port is semi-randomized which doesn’t play the nicest with my totally legit linux iso torrenting setup… But a quick docker ps and docker logs and then updating the config is pretty trivial and I only have to do it maybe once a week?

The big elephant in the room is that, as you rightfully understand, you are still putting a LOT of trust. But that is actually why I like Proton. Because other companies pretend they are going to knife fight the CIA and the US Government on your behalf all while actively not acknowledging anything until we get a post mortem. Proton are VERY open about just how far they are willing to go to protect you (not very) and what YOU can do to mean that Proton can’t provide much useful information once the appropriate paperwork and legal actions have been filed.

I wouldn’t trust a paid account with anything more sensitive than what really innovative stuff a friend did with a bun in the dumpster behind the Wendy’s the other night. But, hypothetically, if I needed to send an anonymous email? Third party VPN/Tor, clean hardware, and a free Protonmail account works great and I do trust Proton to give the absolute bare minimum in that case.

And just for a bit of context. My “grand plan” is to migrate the vast majority of my correspondence and accounts to email addresses tied to one or more of my own domains. Currently I plan to use Protonmail for the mail server because I don’t want that smoke. But the point is that I control the email address so I can get my Heat on and walk away in 30 seconds (actually more like a few hours but…).

Which is why the other aspect of that is that I want to back up the emails I actually want to save (rather than just EVERYTHING like those of us with older gmail accounts do) via a local client that I then archive to an encrypted volume on my NAS and (REDACTED) after that.

The last few elections and the clusterfuck of a primary show that nobody can run on trump but trump.

So… No worries about him being a martyr.

Gun nuts are some of the most obnoxiously entitled people on the planet. In large part because they define themselves by how much money they have given gun companies and feel like they have a constitutional amendment specifically for them. Any time something is taken away from them they cry harder than a toddler who was told they can’t have chicken nuggets for dinner.

As for bump stocks specifically? A lot of the smaller gun companies were pushing for similar “loophole” devices and, thus, have been focusing a lot of sponsor money on gun youtubers to talk about how they aren’t covered by the assault weapon ban because it is very specifically about “multiple rounds from a single pull of the trigger”. So now they are “technically correct” on top of it.

Friendly reminder that bump stock bans and anything related to fire rate is, at best, performative and more often outright malicious compliance/legislature.

The two most common types of ammunition used in mass shootings are 9mm pistol rounds and 5.56 nato/.223 rifle rounds. Neither of which overpenetrate soft tissue to any meaningful degree*. Once you are at the semi-automatic fire rate it is just wasting ammo as you pump a dozen rounds into one kid desperately trying to protect their Bluey doll from the hell that is the second amendment.

This is a big chunk of why the only people in the military who are even “allowed” to fire in full auto are machine gunners. Anyone else is either in an incredibly specific situation or just wasting ammo. And its why so many militaries throughout the decades have outright disabled automatic fire on their infantry rifles.

If we ACTUALLY care about half measures to protect people from mass shootings? Magazine capacity is the way to go. Because the lives saved by murderers needing to reload their emotional support assault rifles will be a lot higher than those saved by making it take a bit longer to dump a magazine into one innocent child.

And, obviously, the real answer is actual gun control and firearm bans. Bare minimum is treating semiautomatics with the same restrictions as automatic weapons. If you want to hunt or target shoot you can use a revolver or bolt action.

*: The 5.56 is a particularly evil round due to its tendency to tumble/yaw upon entering the human body. So you get tiny entrance wounds and massive exit wounds.

The gun lobbyists who fought to ensure the poison pill law was overly specific in the first place.

Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.

Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.

*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.

If google “charged for it like other companies would” then youtube would not exist. The ONLY companies that can handle that volume of data are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft: The three big cloud service providers. And Microsoft noped the fuck out and Amazon have some strong purges on most streams.

And… there were other sites that tried to compete with youtube. Those of us who are old enough will remember subscribing to Rooster Teeth or Giant Bomb but watching the videos on youtube because “the site player is shit”. Let alone all the general purpose video sites that either became dirtier than a truck stop lizard who barebacks constantly or became liveleak and was all about Faces of Death and revenge porn… and then went out of business.

Videos is INCREDIBLY expensive. That is why the current rise of sites like Nebula and Gun Jesus’s site and Corridor Crew’s site all paywall watching anything. Because free video would cost way too much.

If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.

So… you actively dislike a model where you can choose to watch videos in exchange for watching an ad and instead insist upon paying to watch anything. AND still don’t want to pay to watch anything because Youtube Premium lets you do that anyway.

It won’t matter.

“Brandon obviously used soros’s deep state to fake his results. And it doesn’t matter if someone is on drugs because that is our God given right and everyone should have enough ketamine and coke in their body to kill a dozen horses”

The Left constantly makes that mistake. chuds have no shame.

Actually speculation is that twitter and general poor decision making may be overextending him.

He still has more “worth” than any of us can ever dream of. But he doesn’t have the liquidity to do anything with it. And considering the strong indications that it is the Saudis and possibly the Russians who bankrolled a lot of the twitter shit…

A good way to think about it is this: Your friend from college who actually managed to buy a house a couple years back? They have more “money” than most people you know. But, unless they are willing to sell that house, they can’t do anything with it. So they are still living based on their paychecks and savings in the bank.