I have to hand it to them, they are really good at finding new, innovative ways to make the platform worse.
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Meanwhile on Steam my "family" consists of 3 adults with different addresses, last names, and credit cards, who have had accounts for decades and never lived at the same place.
We have full access to each other's library.
Gabe Newell is 62 years old. Gonna enjoy this gravy train while we can...
Man I hope he lives to a 100 at least, why am I always late to the party, I learn about Limewire and it dies the next year, I get access to my sister's Netflix account and Netflix goes to shit, I'm finally able to afford a gaming laptop and buy Steam games and now I'm too busy and tired from work to play them and Gabe is getting older. I wish I could go back in time and do things differently
I'd tell myself to start investing my money and hit the gym, but I'm unemployed right now and I know once I'm employed again finding the time in this rat race is gonna be difficult but I'm gonna start valuing my time more seriously, I've uninstalled doom scroll apps like Instagram and I'm working on time blocking my tasks, hopefully that pays off
Good for you! I hope you find a good job soon.
In the meantime, I recommend doing some exercise because that's something you can completely control your progress on. If you don't have a gym membership, body weight workouts are absolutely a thing you should check out.
My understanding is that gaben has already put an action plan in place for when the company moves on from his leadership.
From what I've heard of it, the people in line behind Gabe will be upholding the same values.
We should have at least another ~40 years or more of this before sometimes entitled brat inherits the company and sells it off to a foreign interest.
With all that being said: long live gaben.
With all that being said: long live gaben.
I like Steam, I like that they aren't being dicks and treat users well. That said: billionaires are not your friend.
There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
I didn't say there was.
I just want this specific billionaire to continue to live because, unlike most billionaires, he's not making my life more difficult.
He's basically refused to let steam become enshittified. Other billionaires would have long ago succumb to the one that they serve, the almighty dollar, and done whatever they can to extract the most value from their user base. Enshittifying the platform in the process, and actively making my life worse.
So as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to billionaires, gaben is far from the worst.
I have a short list of billionaires that kinda fit into the category of: I don't mind that they exist.
There's a much longer list of billionaires that I'd like to see pushing up the daisies.
Not that I can, or would, do anything to make that happen. I just, wouldn't hate it if it happened.
Gaben is gonna be the first person to digitally upload their consciousness.
While steam has historically been "good", doesn't mean it'll stay that way...
Sure, the 2 constants in the universe are Entropy and Enshitification. When Steam turns to shit I'll go back to Piracy just like I did when Netflix went to shit.
My point is that companies don't have to be shit about account sharing and family plans, and people don't have to accept it.
It's mostly that a feature on it went from "okayish" to "far more consumer-friendly", which was incredibly unexpected of them to do. Everyone figured Steam library sharing would die but instead they roll out Family that has far looser restrictions than the system they'd had for over a decade.
Can't play the same game at the same time unless both own it, and DLC isn't shared, but my partner being able to play anything I own that I'm not playing is pretty rad of a positive change.
Meanwhile Nintendo's system got worse instead.
Didn't know steam even had a family option, it's good to know
I had that error a couple of times, and it inexplicably resolved itself. Try having the person join again (which may require a new invite). I think only 1 out of 4 members of my family were able to join without that initial error message. This was back when Steam had just switched how they handled family sharing, so I assumed it was just an implementation bug of some sort. One of my friends took three attempts before they could join, but it worked ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Though I will note that steam family sharing no longer works if the person is located in another country for the purposes of Steam billing region (so my Norwegian friend could not join my UK family)
Login on their PC or let them login on yours
That's the old way of handling it. (And I think it still works.) They have a new implementation that's just the family group admin sending an invite and the recipient accepting.
Which only works If you were in the same Network atleast for me
Fuck GOOG for normalizing surveillance capitalism
Fuck YouTube in particular for making it basically impossible to usefully host an Invidious proxy any more and for their algorithmic manipulation
PeerTube is the Way
A big problem with peertube is monetization. There should be some sort of mechanism that'd do that automatically. Otherwise there won't be much content ever. Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy that it exists but just don't see it replacing even few % of YouTube as it is.
If you want monetization and scalability, you're gonna have to get ads. Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare. Very few people (less than 0.1%) are "making it" on Patreon and the like. The bitter truth is that most users can't afford to financially support their favorite creators, and damn near zero creators could get the level of exposure needed to be sustainable without an ad-based platform backing them.
Video hosting is expensive af. Ultimately, small-time content creation is completely dependent on corporate benefactors. This is why every video platform that's tried to compete against YouTube has failed. Nebula is trying, but that's only useful to creators who fit within its specific niche.
I'm not saying this as a vote of support for the current system. Just an observation of how the market has played out so far.
Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare.
Believe it or not, YouTube Premium is one of them. A Premium view is worth more than an ad-supported view to a creator.
(Obviously Patreon is better, as they can’t make a living off of only Premium views because it’s a smaller group; the population of ad-supported users is much much larger. But YouTube Premium does benefit the creators more than ad-supported YouTube does.)
you're gonna have to get ads
I don't think that necessarily follows.
Have you heard of self-hosted Patreon-similar Ghost ?
No, and neither has anybody else. Not saying that to be rude or dismissive, but just using their own numbers on the front page to paint a picture. They have ~3,000 paying members as of right now. Patreon has over 10,000,000 paying members, and even then only a tiny, tiny fraction of their creators are actually sustainable.
Paid subscription services like this are a great idea, in theory; I'd love to get away from ad-supported platforms. But the truth is that they just don't work for all but a few lucky people.
That's 100% true, but YT also foots the bill that creators would otherwise be responsible for when it comes to just the basics. Free hosting/distribution of high res full-length videos, globally accessible, with a player app that is actively developed and maintained, a recommendation algorithm to put your content in front of viewers' eyes... That, alone, has tremendous value for a creator that they really can't get anywhere else without paying out of pocket. All of those things would have to otherwise be paid for/maintained by the creators. While it's not a direct payment, YT relieves a huge burden for creators.
It sucks because it keeps creators' success dependent on corporate oligarchs. But at the same time, it's also great because it gives them a fighting chance to get started.
Shallow content comes from trying to manipulate the recommendations algorithm and "go viral". Without a recommendations algorithm, the incentive disappears.
The front page is a direct reflection of the content you engage with.
And props to the dedicated folks still running Invidious instances like https://yewtu.be
Where would the money come from?
The whole internet has gone to shit
Firefox + ublock origin still works to block all YouTube ads
Invidious is a frontend for YouTube that blocks all their trackers and ads
PeerTube is an alternative community ran platform to replace YouTube in the future
ff+ubo+privacy badger (ff on my distro suggested privacy badger, can't remember exact number but when ubo blocks over ~1k privacy badger has like 2 - 4 on it, surprising me a little there are not more trackers) on pc, my phone has no adblocking atm and I know their info on me is wrong because all I do see are gambling ads and I have never gone to a gambling site, I don't even get the scam game ads my gf does on her phone. One day I may try out one of the "delete my dam info" places just to see how much they really have on me
Just use Firefox Mobile to watch YouTube.
Ad blocking through uBO and can enable playing with locked screen.
I keep trying to convert my friends to using Firefox mobile for this reason. I generally try not to evangelise too much, but I have so many friends who keep complaining about ads when browsing the internet on mobile, and this would literally solve their problem. One friend complained about ads so frequently that they ended up getting irked at me telling them the problem was solvable. Our unhappy compromise was that I would stop telling them to use Firefox and uBO if they stopped complaining about this so much in front of me.
I respect their choices, but by God, I'm baffled by them. I get that inertia makes it hard to make switches like this, but when you're spending so much time complaining about how much effort it takes to use the internet on your mobile, why would you not just solve the problem?
I had someone say "Well, yours doesn't do ads" and, in the year of 5 manufacturers pumping out 10 different SKUs a year, we had the same model phone.
I said "Yours doesn't have to, if you set it up that way."
The answer? "Well, c'mon, play the video."
Like, yeah, let's just brush past the... What? Five or six tap solution? And before anyone asks, not a romantic opening. Generally people don't make passes at bridge trolls who evangelize for open source software.
Just use Firefox Mobile
to watch YouTube.
There we go, fixed it for you
Running personalDNSFilter (whole phone, non-root adblocker) blocks ads just fine for me in the official unmodified Youtube app.
I really wanted to like and use Peertube more, but it's so devoid of any content aside from political podcasts, as far as I can tell. I can't tell if the search function is bad, or I'm using it wrong, or there really is just that little content. Any recommendations for Peertube content?
Invidious sadly doesn't allow for an account and subscriptions, at least not without running your own server which appears... complex.
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