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Shit’s making me ready to kill myself tomorrow. No, Youtube adblock doesn’t matter, most of my Youtube consumption happens on the TV app with my remote. This isn’t about personally losing my bread and circuses, this is about how the best social medium we currently have is Youtube other such mediums like TikTok (don’t even use it, but recognize it as extraordinarily important and innovative). But every way the ruling class forces us to change our lifestyle based on their ads borders on life ruining. Because it’s not about the actual bread or the circuses, it’s about elevating the bread and circuses, making them bigger and thinner than ever so we feel more satisfied but more starved.
“Enshittification” is the academic term for the phenomenon
making them bigger and thinner than ever so we feel more satisfied but more starved
That’s what happened to the entire Star Wars franchise since Disney bought it: there’s more of it than ever but most of it is more forgettable.
Literally one of the smartest things that Capital could do is to pool a tiny amount of their resources and make Netflix and Youtube free for the masses. These are incredible tools for keeping the masses placated.
That’s assuming Capital exists as a single centrally planned homogenate, rather than a set of competing factions all warring over the stream of revenue that media consumers produce. We did once try something akin to this, with the Public Broadcasting Service. And it was very successful, at least for a little while, in its effort to command a large audience and manipulate public opinion along a liberal ideological view.
But now we have a much more Anarcho-Capitalist approach to infotainment. We’ve implemented a tiered and tranched distribution of media services, from Talk Radio on the bottom-of-the-barrel free feed to Pay-Per-View streaming services on the high end. They all serve the same fundamental role as Netflix/Youtube, but the lower tiers tend to have a more vulgar and poorly produced advertising methodology.
And people still consume these channels voraciously. No shortage of folks who will suffer through five minute YouTube ads or who eventually buckle to the “Please Pay Me!!” pop-ups that soft gate the service. Similarly, Netflix has no trouble maintaining a subscriber pool of a quarter billion registered accounts (with households averaging north of 2 viewers).
The payment model serves two purposes. It forces people to register their participation - through an online account - and allows digital tagging and tracking of consumption habits. It also provides a threat of deprivation to disobedient proles. If you don’t clock in, you won’t have enough money to pay your bills. That includes entertainment. The cost isn’t particularly prohibitive, even to the poorest economic cohorts. But you are required to buy in and sign up and maintain the account, which puts an onus on people to keep in the good graces of the capitalist managers.
As a wise man once said, if you’re good at something never do it for free.
But how are the investors supposed to make money off of it?!
It’s Alphabet, they can 100% afford to have youtube premium be the default, they’re just greedy.
one of the only good things about the stage of capitalism that we’re in right now is that the capitalists are complete fucking idiots with no instincts for the preservation of their class. the competence has been fully bred out of them Habsburg-style at this point
Death to America
I think it’s arguably that they are beginning to see the end of the window of profitability and so they are gutting things on the way out. Obviously there are true failsons fucking things up like Elon, but a lot of it I think is actually them acting reasonably from the standpoint of quarterly gains and perhaps even medium-term profit-maximizing, because how intrusive Netflix ads are during a nuclear war doesn’t really make a difference (meaning short-term gain is the only thing to optimize).
Suffering from success
Conversely, they’ve realized the general population is even more servile and neutered then they expected and they are doing this to constantly reinforce there’s nothing we can do and they’ll make things as shitty as they want and nobody’s gonna do anything about it. They’re trying to soft sell us on being back in a feudal society and they’re about 60% of the way there.
Working in exchange for housing with no pay is gonna be a thing again in our lifetimes.
“Now watch this drive” but about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
Honestly if they take us back to feudal relationships it makes it easier to do revolution because it completely decomplicates who the oppressors are to the average person. It makes the enemy easy to see. One of the biggest factors of capitalism that helps them prevent revs is how the enemy is less identifiable.
well that is some wishful thinking.
I don’t think this is actually true, feudal relations were very stable and persisted for millennia in some places. It feels that way because the propaganda machine isn’t justifying feudal social relations currently. Company housing for example is slowly becoming more popular, even in the west.
The corvee labour system makes it extremely obvious you’re working for someone else and more than you need to than the wage system where you work some number of hours get some number of money in wages and go home. The amount you work to pay your own wage isn’t obvious. Having to work for a feudal lord or having to give up things to them directly via taxation makes them easily hated and peasant uprisings happened all the time because of it, what they didn’t have was a conscious rejection of feudalism as a system but they knew who to blame (other than Jews obviously). Under capitalism people often complain about taxation and burgled theft because they make it plain who’s taking what from whom.
Peasant uprisings were much less common than labor unrest today, though granted that isn’t exactly the same.
Additionally, exploitation in peasant economies was not always as transparent as you indicate. Often, it was at least slightly hidden. For example, a peasant might be required to give sacks of grain to the lord who owns the mill, and instead of being allowed to keep some for seeds, they must buy the seeds from the lord, inequalities here can hold the exploitation. Further, debt was a constant of feudal relations and gives a veneer of legitimacy to exploitation, just as it does today. Further, surplus value extraction can be seen as acceptable to the peasant if they believe it is justified. The lord can claim that his cut is in exchange for protection, insurance, and other services. This applies to taxation today.
Good points.
One of the core tenets of this charade of a system is that people need to be convinced that there’s no such thing as “free”. Otherwise they will start thinking that a socialist system is possible and we can’t have that.
It’s a shame the ruling class can’t agree on anything if it gets in the way of their short term returns.
If their goal was to placate sure.
If their goal was to reinforce that every single tiny thing you enjoy can be taken away from you with a snap of the fingers if you even think about complaining about the people who could make that decision the situation makes more sense.
You know, if they just simply kept ads to be some banner on the top and bottom of the page, maybe some image on the side that didn’t interrupt you, the most intrusive thing being that the ad may be brightly colored and animated so your eye moves to it, nobody would EVER block ads. But they brought this upon themselves.
Used to be that way, and we definitely blocked ads then too. Having seizure flashes in the corner of your eye is incredibly annoying
Back in the day when Google ads initially rolled out, they billed themselves as the “ethical” version of ads because they restricted things like flashing colors, popups, etc which had gotten really bad. That was when Google’s motto was still “don’t be evil”.
Yeah adwords were the best ads have ever been online
I started using adblock when ads only existed in this form because I had ADHD.
I stopped watching youtube for entertainment when i got spammed with cookie thingy, although i’m a type of guy who will wait for 5 hours for torrent to download instead of paying 2 bucks.
Now i just catch up on invidious every week with pbs spacetime and wtyp
although i’m a type of guy who will wait for 5 hours for torrent to download instead of paying 2 bucks.
as you should
I just blocked their blocking popup with ublock’s “block element” feature.
Works fine but I can’t scroll down to comments or see recommended videos anymore. Loss of those features is probably an improvement though tbh.
how did u do this i tried but the rest of the site stays greyed out and can’t click anything. Can you post what you have in the “My Filters” ?
This first section is an older one I had when they first started this stuff. The second one I added yesterday. They probably combine in some way, I have no idea how the first one works someone here posted it when the first wave of bullshit ages ago.
youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)
! 2023-10-16 https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com##tp-yt-paper-dialog.ytd-popup-container.style-scope www.youtube.com##.openedawesome, thank you! Weirdly, the message is no longer popping up for me right now but i will try those if it comes back
youtube dlp plug: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
I go out of my way to follow the rules, like watching a sport even on the NBC website with their commercials, and then after ten minutes they say “you must sign in to your tv provider”.
So I get aboard my ship, put on my eyepatch and find the game in an Iranian server farm. I don’t want to be a pirate, they make me.
Trying to find the seasons of the One Piece anime that haven’t been uploaded to Netflix yet (and were taken down from Crunchyroll and Funimation) turned me into the King of the Pirates.
A VPN and a decent sized hard drive with Jellyfin is way cheaper than 12 different streaming services that either all have the same shit, don’t have the shit I want, or has ok original content that gets canceled after 2 seasons.
But its a very individualist solution. As soon as you try to expand the solution to a wider network of friends and neighbors, you dramatically raise your risk of being targeted for legal or physical reprisals.
Kinda off topic but I’m actually mad that one piece (live-action) is good because i know Netflix will ruin it somehow. I’m still
about the WitcherAs long as they don’t fire the current showrunners, the show will stay good. At the most they’ll cancel it early.
If they fire Matt Owens or Steven Maeda, that’s when to bail.
“Early” meaning in less than the 20+ years it’d take to complete?
Can’t even believe I’m saying this but I’m sort of interested in seeking it out. I’m not much of an anime watcher but I like the manga and the early stretch of it is massively nostalgic for me
They’re condensing a lot of it so it’ll probably take 10 years to complete instead of 20. I mean the absolute worst case would be if they cancel after S2 now, so we’d at least get up to Drum Island I reckon. And like I said, I don’t think we’d get a GoT situation as long as Matt Owens is running the show, cos the only changes he did to the story (besides cutting stuff for time) was to better set up stuff in Arlong Park that’ll only pay off in Sabaody Archipelago, which are really good changes imo.
The anime has killed off my harddisks space because the only way to I could get the early seasons was in giant compilations yo-hohoho. There’s also apparently a remake/remaster of the OP anime somewhere with better animation that I have no idea how to find
At $17M/episode, I imagine they’re just going to drop the series in another year or two.
I’d be happy just to see how the hell they’re gonna do Chopper and Brook. 3 seasons would satisfy me, 5 would be more than i could hope for
it’ll be incredibly funny if the show somehow lasts long enough to get to the current arcs and we’ll get to live action gear 5
They want you to give them money or die
I just click allow and close the pop-up lol, haven’t had issues with it blocking me from playing. I use the YouTube Enhancer extension rather than a dedicated blocker, maybe that’s why?
Could you just use OffLiberty to download the videos locally to circumvent the ads?
Replying directly to the image:
The endgame is for you to die!
It’s been pushing me to consume more free content like podcasts and public domain audiobooks.
Is this dual power?
The cia need their mind control machine to make a profit
This guy will just sheepishly retreat into the videogames he claims to hate on /v/. America’s reputation is so low that it’s fun to think that these guys not getting good enough TV and games means a world war has to happen, but in reality their butthurt doesn’t influence stuff like that, it’s just a narcissistic cope.
Also the content isn’t gone, they just have to watch ads. He’s just plain making shit up.
