Uh oh, the hangover from the decade long 0% interest rates party seems to be hitting.
@Hoss I've wondered since 2010 how the fuck these companies continue to exist being black holes for revenue. A assumed it was just the CIA bankrolling them to broadcast propaganda since they all all say the exact same thing at the exact same time.
Does google's revenue cover for youtube's losses? Having the monopoly over anything is a pretty huge draw and something worth paying for regardless of a cia paycheck
@rher @Hoss At the very least, they would have pulled this ad injection stuff a lot sooner. Instead they lost billions per year in order to keep it as appealing as possible to everyone. I assume if the primary motive was profit they would do like X where they've largely shut it off to public consumption and just made it a paypig club.
I'm thinkin' the reason Google is shitting up YouTube has something to do with the fact that they ruined every other Google product that was actually profitable over the past ~5 years.
@Hoss @RustyCrab @rher the problem with social media is it's unprofitable, but it was like why Jeff Bezos bought a newspaper. It's a great mouthpiece and locus of control.
When you understand that, Elon Musk buying Twitter makes sense. In a way it was also like SomethingAwful where a moderator and heavy user of the site bought the site for the forums. No really. If you go there now it redirects to the forum and the old articles are a click away and unupdated after a trolls remorse post got nuked by LowT/someone else.
When you understand that, Elon Musk buying Twitter makes sense. In a way it was also like SomethingAwful where a moderator and heavy user of the site bought the site for the forums. No really. If you go there now it redirects to the forum and the old articles are a click away and unupdated after a trolls remorse post got nuked by LowT/someone else.
@Hoss @RustyCrab @rher The other question is, how do you monetize YouTube? It is the costliest kind of social media site to run overall, compared to every single other social media site on earth because video eats megabytes and they haven't moved to a more efficient codec yet. There's also the fact that aside from adblockers, the site payouts are poor (this is why every fucking YouTuber takes sketchy sponsorships from shit like Betterhelp, which is so tainted that merely accepting their sponsorship will cause the comments to be shitting on them, and moved to the Patreon model).
As much as the mere mention of WebP starts a shitshow, WebP was designed in part to solve this issue with images and WebP images are really fucking tiny. If it wasn't for the "one implementation" issue and a company everyone hates being tied to it, people wouldn't mind it as much.
Also, the streaming site competition was even worse for YouTube because the idiots at Google didn't know what people pay money for. It was bad enough for the Netflix wannabes of the world making slop TV shows nobody wants, but it was a million times worse with YouTube thinking people will pay money to watch MrBeast's reality show level competitions.
Twitter is mostly text posts/images, and aside from paid users short form video.
As much as the mere mention of WebP starts a shitshow, WebP was designed in part to solve this issue with images and WebP images are really fucking tiny. If it wasn't for the "one implementation" issue and a company everyone hates being tied to it, people wouldn't mind it as much.
Also, the streaming site competition was even worse for YouTube because the idiots at Google didn't know what people pay money for. It was bad enough for the Netflix wannabes of the world making slop TV shows nobody wants, but it was a million times worse with YouTube thinking people will pay money to watch MrBeast's reality show level competitions.
Twitter is mostly text posts/images, and aside from paid users short form video.
@Hoss @RustyCrab @rher The other elephant in the room is every competitor to YouTube either ends up branded alt-tech and attracting fringe weirdos (BitChute), dies off due to no money (Vid.me and numerous forgotten names in the halls of internet history like Metacafe), or both (Odysee after the LBRY fiasco).
One of the guys I followed back in the day shitting on the early signs YT was unsustainable had a good point about YouTube. YouTube started with a trick that nobody else can recreate: the site had heavy uploads of copyrighted material and clips from TV shows that lured people in. Then the copyright lawsuits/takedowns hit and Google swept in to buy it. This would start the transition from a creator driven site to a "top dog" driven site, of which people like RWJ, PewDiePie, Shane Dawson, iJustine, and more would dominate the site, with Cosmic Panda and feature removal turning the site away from it's community origins.
Before the Alt-Tech grifters found one way to keep people on your site as a containment site (which came after his videos), Veoh was infamously shut down for this very reason and had a high profile lawsuit.
It is literally easier to start up a competitor to literally any other social media site for this reason.
One of the guys I followed back in the day shitting on the early signs YT was unsustainable had a good point about YouTube. YouTube started with a trick that nobody else can recreate: the site had heavy uploads of copyrighted material and clips from TV shows that lured people in. Then the copyright lawsuits/takedowns hit and Google swept in to buy it. This would start the transition from a creator driven site to a "top dog" driven site, of which people like RWJ, PewDiePie, Shane Dawson, iJustine, and more would dominate the site, with Cosmic Panda and feature removal turning the site away from it's community origins.
Before the Alt-Tech grifters found one way to keep people on your site as a containment site (which came after his videos), Veoh was infamously shut down for this very reason and had a high profile lawsuit.
It is literally easier to start up a competitor to literally any other social media site for this reason.
@PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss
>It is literally easier to start up a competitor to literally any other social media site for this reason.
It seems exactly the same with other social media sites.
* All the Twitter competitors are just the same as the Youtube competitors: either echo-chambers for political dissidents (e.g Gab or Parler) or decentralized protocols that only techies would use, despite it being functionally no different than email.
* When it comes to Reddit-like sites, there were both Immzy and Voat which are both now defunct and suffered from the same problems as Gab and Bitchute. Otherwise, you have the Lemmy instances which turned out to be an even bigger shitshow than Mastodon.
* As for Facebook, nobody would ever use a Facebook alternative, because those sites require your IRL friends and family to join. You are better off sticking to email or setting up an SMS group chat for your friends and family.
* Tumblr seems to have a few alternatives like Pillowfort, but I don't know much about them.
https://namelessrumia.heliohost.org/w/doku.php?id=tumblr_alternatives
@xianc78 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss The difference with those sites is it's not a money sink to the same degree, and Reddit's purges led to far more containment sites for specific communities, and unlike imageboards they tend to be far more active.
Take rdrama.net as a prime example. It might as well be "like KF (during the 2010s) but Reddit" but that has a huge community. The same goes with ip2 refugees moving to communities.win.
https://communities.win/c/IP2Always/
They're not trying to be a normie website like certain alt-tech sites tried to project themselves as, they know their audience, and they are enjoying it.
Take rdrama.net as a prime example. It might as well be "like KF (during the 2010s) but Reddit" but that has a huge community. The same goes with ip2 refugees moving to communities.win.
https://communities.win/c/IP2Always/
They're not trying to be a normie website like certain alt-tech sites tried to project themselves as, they know their audience, and they are enjoying it.
Follow
@PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss Social news sites are nothing new. Reddit is unique in that it allows you to create your own communities within the site. Sites like rDrama are no different than sites like HackerNews, SlashDot, Fark.com, or MachoSucko.
The Digg clone that Reddit started out as is basically an entirely different site from what it turned into.
@xianc78 @Hoss @RustyCrab @rher Even this mindset spread to sites like rdrama, and /r/drama was like this as well. Here's a random ass rdrama post, where OP reads just like a post on a forum and the replies do too.
https://rdrama.net/post/276696/word-of-caution-for-aspiring-cs
Treating Reddit like a news aggregator is foolish when the userbase of it, and the former userbase of it did not use it like a news aggregator for the most part. There were even many users there making memes and shitposts, like on a forum. Reddit literally replaced forum culture, only to become the worst of it with automods and [REMOVED] [DELETED].
https://rdrama.net/post/276696/word-of-caution-for-aspiring-cs
Treating Reddit like a news aggregator is foolish when the userbase of it, and the former userbase of it did not use it like a news aggregator for the most part. There were even many users there making memes and shitposts, like on a forum. Reddit literally replaced forum culture, only to become the worst of it with automods and [REMOVED] [DELETED].
@PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss I lurked Reddit a few times back in the early 2010s just to see what it's about. I rarely saw any actual discussion, and for the time, I found much better discussion on actual forums.
Also, I think Reddit is losing relevance as a hub for discussion thanks to Discord (I honestly see people hosting their communities on there these days).
@xianc78 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss Discord is also gaining controversy due to it's walled garden model to the point I've seen some move off of it. For example, the chrultrabook guys did this.
https://forum.chrultrabook.com/
https://forum.chrultrabook.com/
@YTFoidLover1488 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher @Hoss even the alphabet people know forums are the superior discussion method
@PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss It's nice to see people running forums again.
@xianc78 @PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss It was okay for gamergate discussion, and tech purchase advice until factionalism split it into multiple subreddits and marketers caught on to the fact you could sell shit by posting in the pcmr subreddit.
@GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher @Hoss Reddit is also openly run by AI bots now shilling crap.
https://replyguy.com/
https://replyguy.com/
@PurpCat @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher @Hoss Yep
And sadly both forums and imageboards have gone down the shitter as well.
And sadly both forums and imageboards have gone down the shitter as well.
@GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher @Hoss Forums will never die because they don't have the same unique problems imageboards did. You don't have to worry about a random bot spamming CP (real or AI) and another user making fedposts to the same degree.
The latter caused at least one guy I know of trying his hand at this to bow out of imageboards completely. Someone made threats about Israel, he got a FBI agent contacting him, and he said fuck this I'm out.
The latter caused at least one guy I know of trying his hand at this to bow out of imageboards completely. Someone made threats about Israel, he got a FBI agent contacting him, and he said fuck this I'm out.
You'd have to be out of your fucking mind to run an anonymous imageboard today. It's a miracle the sharty has survived as long as it has, I don't even think somebody like Josh would be interested in trying to run that place.
@Hoss @GD5426 @PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher 8chan.moe is doing just fine though.
@GD5426 @dick @PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss GameGate 2.0 seemed to have revitalize interest in imageboards (at least the video game related boards), but I don't know if activity will ever go back to 8chan levels. A lot of people seem to have given up on imageboards entirely after the original 8chan shutdown and the webring drama. If they are not on the fedi, then they are on niche forums like RPGCodex.
I wasn't big on 8chan even during its golden age, so I haven't kept up with the successors.
@Hoss @GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher 8chan was falling off well before the Wal-Mart shooting. It was at the point where the only boards that had discussion were /pol/ and the gaming boards, and maybe /tech/ but that was dying off too.
The exodus + the pandemic revitalized things for a while, but it could never last.
I liked the idea of 8chan but the pedo shit I saw breeding there skeeved me out too much.
@Hoss @GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher Even back in the day you had to be someone special to run a site with the notoriety of Kiwi Farms or the Sharty.
SomethingAwful and Lowtax come to mind very well. Before he killed himself over disputes over failed marriages, he was genuinely a crazy person in a way. He just for a time happened to as they say, fall upwards. He managed to turn a gig writing for some Planet Quake or something into his own comedy site, and charging for the forums was his way of monetizing it and getting rich.
The business model for the longest time paid off to the point that after his suicide, the new owner talked about how he turned down an offer from Conde Nast as the site was still bringing home the bacon, but it also had many negative consequences for the website's health a decade or two later.
It would create an absolute hugbox of a community where you had to pay to play. This worked when the site was a major hub of internet discussion, but it didn't when users like Moot fucked off to start their own sites and communities moved off site.
Also, as the site was no longer in vogue, nobody would pay money for new accounts.
SomethingAwful and Lowtax come to mind very well. Before he killed himself over disputes over failed marriages, he was genuinely a crazy person in a way. He just for a time happened to as they say, fall upwards. He managed to turn a gig writing for some Planet Quake or something into his own comedy site, and charging for the forums was his way of monetizing it and getting rich.
The business model for the longest time paid off to the point that after his suicide, the new owner talked about how he turned down an offer from Conde Nast as the site was still bringing home the bacon, but it also had many negative consequences for the website's health a decade or two later.
It would create an absolute hugbox of a community where you had to pay to play. This worked when the site was a major hub of internet discussion, but it didn't when users like Moot fucked off to start their own sites and communities moved off site.
Also, as the site was no longer in vogue, nobody would pay money for new accounts.
@PurpCat @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher @Hoss Yeah, as much as imageboards have their advantages- having to moderate them is an absolute nightmare. Being able to lock down registration and ban accounts during raids is so much safer in terms of staying on the good side of the law.
If and when I ever get around to running any sort of community site online it'll probably just be a standard forum solely for that reason alone.
If and when I ever get around to running any sort of community site online it'll probably just be a standard forum solely for that reason alone.
It's in the system's interest that an anonymous imageboard platform is as much of a nightmare to run as humanly possible.
@Hoss @GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher If you want to go all the way, it's also in the system's interest to ditch pseudonymous discussion.
Tumblr wasn't anon, but a lot of the reason why people there felt comfortable powerleveling hard was that they were doing it under a username, which was in contrast to the firstname lastname model of Facebook and some other older communities like mailing lists and usenet.
Tumblr wasn't anon, but a lot of the reason why people there felt comfortable powerleveling hard was that they were doing it under a username, which was in contrast to the firstname lastname model of Facebook and some other older communities like mailing lists and usenet.
@PurpCat @GD5426 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss The only reason why I don't feel like pseudonymous discussions won't completely go away, despite calls for it is because I'm pretty sure even normie parents don't like the idea of their children public discussing things under their real names.
@xianc78 @GD5426 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss Even some system enjoyers are all for it, mostly with the trans issue coming to mind. Lately real name policies are falling out of favor and that's a good thing.
https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html
Of course I have another real world example of this being a bad thing: the shitty corporation.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net.git/commit/?id=4acd47644ef1e1c8f8f5bc40b7cf1c5b9bcbbc4e
https://www.phoronix.com/news/IBM-Employee-100p-Time
https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html
Of course I have another real world example of this being a bad thing: the shitty corporation.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net.git/commit/?id=4acd47644ef1e1c8f8f5bc40b7cf1c5b9bcbbc4e
https://www.phoronix.com/news/IBM-Employee-100p-Time
@PurpCat @GD5426 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss I never understood why IBM prohibits people working on hobby projects. I don't see why it's a problem unless the project in question is in direct competition (e.g you contribute to ReactOS while working for Microsoft).
@xianc78 @GD5426 @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss Some of these megacorps are just that evil. I wish I was kidding.
A friend of mine said he would never sign a contract like this, he had to get a lawyer to wrangle his way into a better contract at his current job that was not predatory.
A friend of mine said he would never sign a contract like this, he had to get a lawyer to wrangle his way into a better contract at his current job that was not predatory.
I don't even know how that's legal. If non-competes just got thrown out I don't see why something like that shouldn't be too.
@xianc78 @GD5426 @Hoss @RustyCrab @rher Though I'll say this about IBM: they are 100% stingy about emulation. I once learned about how some guy wrote a HPPA core for HP 9000 Series 700 emulation, was gonna drop it into MAME, and then dumped it out of fear that his new IBM job would tie his hands.
Why? IBM really, really, has a grudge against emulators. This is because of the fear that the Hercules project would be competition for their hardware, as it can run z/OS perfectly. At some point, the dev tried to get IBM to let them run z/OS legally in it and they refused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)
IBM also shit themselves not long ago over Micro Focus COBOL.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3680515/ibm-sues-micro-focus-for-mainframe-software-copyright-infringement.html
https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/7:2022cv09910/589865
And over someone offering "modernization":
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ibm-lzlabs-mainframe-modernization-lawsuit/
Why? IBM really, really, has a grudge against emulators. This is because of the fear that the Hercules project would be competition for their hardware, as it can run z/OS perfectly. At some point, the dev tried to get IBM to let them run z/OS legally in it and they refused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)
IBM also shit themselves not long ago over Micro Focus COBOL.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3680515/ibm-sues-micro-focus-for-mainframe-software-copyright-infringement.html
https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/7:2022cv09910/589865
And over someone offering "modernization":
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ibm-lzlabs-mainframe-modernization-lawsuit/
@GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher @Hoss The other advantage of forums is the ability to build a community that sticks around IMO, though sometimes you don't want to know where the man behind the screen went 5 years from now.
Sometimes the man behind the screen from five years ago becomes a Troll's Remorse case who would've found more dignity in death.
@Hoss @GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher If only you knew where the people I knew 10 years ago ended up, it's much worse than just mere trolls remorse. It's far far worse.
:marseydeadinside:
:marseydeadinside:
I have a childhood friend who dropped off the face of the planet after high school. I used to wonder what the fuck happened to him, but in recent years I've come to believe some mysteries are better left unsolved.
@Hoss @GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @rher Many of the ones I knew might as well be characters in a postmodern remake of Trainspotting or Less Than Zero, for the lack of a better term.
That's freaking grim, imagine having so many ex-friends who live in Glasgow 💀
@rher @GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @Hoss I knew of a few online who lived in the UK who literally ended up as drifter drug addicts at worst, and at best lonely men hooked on sex and with no future in life other than playing video games and turning into a human petri dish to fill the void.
Awful. I hope they get better.
@rher @GD5426 @RustyCrab @xianc78 @Hoss I doubt they will honestly and that's the depressing part.
It's why it makes me happy when I hear about my old childhood neighbor marrying and getting a wife and kids. Or even someone I knew becoming a niche internet artist.
It's why it makes me happy when I hear about my old childhood neighbor marrying and getting a wife and kids. Or even someone I knew becoming a niche internet artist.
@GD5426 @PurpCat @RustyCrab @rher @Hoss I think textboards have a chance. Sure, you can still easily fedpost, but CP spam isn't a thing (outside of links). They also have a different culture where it is much more laid-back and open-minded. The textboards that I have lurked have openly discouraged stormfagging, despite it not being against the rules, so fedposts are much more unlikely to occur there.
>AI that mentions your product in online convos naturally.
Sentences that make me want to repeal the 8th Amendment.
Sentences that make me want to repeal the 8th Amendment.
That's what made the creating a community part so important as the site aged. It was no longer about sharing content and news, but also for say asking for help.