> There are still 1.5 million people paying a monthly subscription service fee for AOL — but instead of dial-up access, these subscribers get technical support and identity theft software.
> The number of AOL dial-up subscribers is now “in the low thousands,” according to a source.
It’s a big organization, which means there will be areas full of great people and areas full of less-than great people. To discount all work from a group that large is just silly.
I've personally been watching YouTube less and less. The ads are insane. I would normally spend more time watching videos but it's become so disruptive
I think most of us can agree that many videos are unnecessarily long (as it's incentivized by the creator for ad revenue), so there's far more fluff in it. With the rise of LLMs, etc for getting knowledge fast , I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph. And when you add 30 second ads every 5 mins it makes it even less compelling
Sideloaded the latest and greatest YouTube++/uYou/uYouPlus/(currently uYouEnhanced) on my iPhone and re-sign it weekly with AltStore, Trollstore, or use a jailbroken equivalent on a device that managed to stay jailbroken.
There’s a few other new options I’ve seen through Reddit for web viewing, iOS content blockers, or hosting your own VPS invidious/piped instance with rotating ipv6 servers (not google/aws/digital ocean as they require using a web panel).
You can leave ads on for whitelisted creators sponsored advertising content also.
I don't want the ads, but I'd rather see the carefully curated list of creators I care about be able to get paid, and Youtube Music works for me. Youtube Premium is worth it.
The ads are indeed insane. They break YouTube in practice. YouTube, in its wisdom, much like a mobster in the protection racket, offers you an out: pay for Premium. I ended up doing this because YT is one of the things I use the most. The alternative was having Firefox with uBlock Origin on every mobile device in my household, I suppose, but this wasn't feasible.
YouTube Premium took the win :(
> I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph
Depends on what you're watching. I always disliked, say, programming tutorials in video form -- give me text, to read and understand at my own pace. Many video tutorials are unnecessarily longwinded and always go at the wrong pace for me, either too fast or too slow.
But I watch tons of videos about other topics where video is the right form. I watch hobby tutorials, I watch videos about cinema/art, etc, and I feel video is the right format for me.
It's harder to avoid bad quality videos that now you can't see downvotes.
As for the video being unnecessarily long - I have played with copying the transcript from the video into ChatGPT, but they tend to be too long for ChatGPT to handle.
More and more content creators are just embedding them directly into their videos. Either by just mentioning sponsor names in the flow of what they are talking about, or doing little sidebars where they talk about/promote their sponsors.
I don't mind these so much because they are easy to skip, but ad-blockers don't catch them.
Yeah but operating a service like YouTube is such a money pit (given on recent HN threads I've read). It seems like they've been mostly able to work because of their huge ad network, targeting, etc.
1) Hosting space/cpu/bandwidth. Video is one of the most intense data jobs out there, behind I suppose maybe AI and Big Data (if anyone is still doing that). You need Terabytes of drive space, petabytes of traffic, all the CDNs, processors capable of encoding inefficient video uploads to efficient video downloads.
2) Network effect. People need to actually want to come, so that people come.
3) Paying for all this - People don't like donating, don't like paying, but hard drives/servers/power banks are not free. So you either charge premiums or use ads.
I wish more people had been willing to pay for Youtube Pro, e.g. (I still do), they're (still) getting worse because the ad-supported version(s) are still the bulk of their income. And so the ad-supported version is messing up everything, being very aggressive, etc. You/I pay for Netflix, why wouldn't you pay for Youtube?
You can't influence the dynamic with capitalism at all when something is free. Sure, companies can "en-shittify", but at least for video this is fairly simple - when it costs too much/works too terribly on one video platform, you can move to the next one. 1) and 2) Make it harder to start a new paid platform, but not impossible - you can directly reflect the costs to your users. YT is just a black box at present...but would have been less so if Youtube Pro had been more popular (ads might have been easier to block, even).
no, no, because you can just grow your own, or just buy guns with cash and use them to exchange them to food. (and if it's not interstate no need for paperwork, right? - in freedom states)
A bit of a rant, but I find it hard to believe pg goes on reddit much if this is how he feels.
I remember years ago reddit was a lot more like HN. The comment section (even for the main subs) was much more intellectual and critical.
People appeared to actually read posted articles. It was a thing where people would read the comment section before the article because everyone knew headlines were generally clickbait, and you could rely on some internet stranger to have analyzed the article and demonstrate the headline wasn't all as it seemed.
But now it seems that no one reads the articles at all or care for any sort of discourse with people with different opinions. Comments are filled with just jabs and pitchforks. No different than comment sections on news sites. Yet Redditors still seem to have the arrogance that it had developed over the years that their communities are better than those sites. And well, they used to be, but now they're just as bad.
I use RES to tag users that fit certain profiles of spamming divisive content or are just karma farming. In the past few months of lurking reddit an hour a day (sadly) I have accumulated more than 200 accounts that I took the time to identify, and many get banned. My count is only that low because I filter subs when I find they're total trash.
Much of reddit is, as they say, a cesspool. I have filtered over 200 subs from /r/all on my browser due to being nothing but spam, or being hatefully divisive on race or identity, or being a political echo chamber. If it burned down, little would be lost, and it would simply be replaced by another spam content farm.
Fun fact: Half of all HN posts/ comments were made in the last five years. I'm brand-new to here instead of reddit (no subs grrr), but look old as the hills from this perspective.
HN has got worse in some places - I think size is the enemy of any community - but HN has comfortably sat behind the curve because it doesn't try to leave its niche. It is mostly outside forces that have changed HN (I.e growth of the general Internet population and big tech), whereas Reddit, etc try to change themselves (by changing their format and gamifying engagement)
HN's worst times was at peak free money tech optimism.
Plenty of pretending that running a "successful" startup wasn't 90% scamming. The actual tech and programming didn't matter, all that mattered was that your `hello world.proj` was a money pump from users to shareholders or from shareholders to founders.
Just find all the old posts that say Uber/WeWork/Theranos/Tesla/SpaceX/etc will all make bajillions in 10 years and their tech is amazing and the problems are actually not that hard.
I selected my interests as Cooking, Fitness, Nature, Video Games, and my feed has absolutely none of that. Just random politics, activism, and jabs at Twitter. Anyway, nope.
I don't actually know how the interests are intended to work, but I can say that the key feature of Bluesky is feeds. (I know this isn't at all obvious.) Feeds are third-party created, for the most part, and essentially function as filters. So, for example, I follow a movies feed. Any post which includes the movie camera emoji, the word "filmsky", or a few other keywords is included in the movies feed. It makes it very easy to swipe over and see discussions of cinema.
That sounds (and is) a lot like tag-based feeds over on Twitter. However, there's additional potential. Behind the scenes, a feed is a service which takes the user info of the person viewing it and the firehose and decides which posts to include based on that input. So "include all posts with these keywords" is valid, but so is "include the top 100 posts with these keywords, as measured by likes." Or "show a feed including only the most recent post from every user the viewer follows."
In other words: feeds are the way a third party can build their own algorithm for the firehose. Very powerful, very useful.
I think the interests section was to try get you to find people and feeds.. but after that, the feeds (or just the Discovery feed?) are influenced by who you follow.. so if you are offered a 'bad' (for you) starting group of people to follow, your feed will probably not be great until you find people you like (that are active) and follow them too.
Also was unsure what "Follow all +" button was.. why not "Follow Selected".. and a 'deselect all'.. I had no idea who all but 2 of the suggestions were. Not going to follow a random "Computer Scientist" the system picked for me sight/posts unseen.
> After his death, the scammers sent Guffey a laughing face emoji and a message using a pseudo account on Instagram after the original one was shut down. “It said, ‘did I tell you your son begged for his life?’” Guffey says. They also demanded money in exchange for the photos.
I wish there was a special prison for these types of people. Jesus Christ.
points to one of the major issues around this. Why are these even possible? Instagram is a social network for real people. Implement a strong form of ID verification. Charge people a dollar for a sign up. Sure there'll still be edge cases of people using stolen creds but it cuts down what, 99.9% of scam? The kid in the article was extorted for 25$. Drive the cost of this crap up.
I had a "son" WhatsApp scammer I took for a chat gpt ride. The "father" wouldn't send money cause the son was an addict. Sleezy scumbag happily pressed along promising rehab, sun and moon.
I haven't used VR/AR in a while, so I don't know if I should have expected this, but those black borders seem pretty large, and I think Apple made it seem the field of vision is much larger than it really is.
The Verge hit the nail on the head with hand gestures. The input device is critical for a new computing platform. This is too awkward to be something you do all day.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is the most returned Apple product.
> There are still 1.5 million people paying a monthly subscription service fee for AOL — but instead of dial-up access, these subscribers get technical support and identity theft software.
> The number of AOL dial-up subscribers is now “in the low thousands,” according to a source.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...