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What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the expe
by kurito 8mo ago
What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place.
At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.
- Ampersander 8mo agoAren't they going to win in the long run with remote attestation?
- nikanj 8mo ago*Allocating man-hours towards making sure that users actually pay for the service they're using, either via youtube subscription or ads
- saagarjha 8mo agoMonetizing a basic OS feature is not a good look.
- sidrag22 8mo agothe only time ive tried to use a feature like that, is when im in the car listening to a podcast or something. juggling the phone to not only skip ads, but also forcing the phone screen to be active, is a hazard. In my case this loophole being closed, wouldn't make me pay for premium... but it would make a younger version of me certainly more dangerous on the road.
- angoragoats 8mo agoDo you ever watch videos on a computer? If so, do you ever switch away to a different tab, or to a different app entirely, and keep the video playing in your browser tab? YouTube artificially prevents that exact same action on tablets and phones unless you pay them. Multitasking is a basic OS feature, no matter what kind of device you’re using. Gating it behind a paywall is user-hostile behavior at its finest.
- realusername 8mo agoMaybe if the Youtube subscription wasn't 10x what they earn from a single user with ads, that would be more believable option.
- BrenBarn 8mo agoIf they wanted users to pay for the service they're using they should never have made YouTube free in the first place.
- reddalo 8mo agoThey made it free just like any other startup makes a free tier to obtain market share.
- learingsci 8mo agoDrug dealers invented this business model, they would give heroin to young children for free and then once hooked hike the prices or force them to turn tricks to pay for their habit. It’s effective but not very admirable to say the least.
- stavros 8mo agoI've also seen this done for cheese, do you find that equally reprehensible? Or is the argument just rhetorical sleight of hand, where "drug dealers do X, so therefore X must be bad"? Drug dealers also consume food, and you know who else consumes food? You.
- learingsci 8mo agoCheesemongers have a bit less impact on society than drug dealers or Google. If Google were raking in hundreds of billions giving kids free cheese then charging them full price for parmigiana some might complain and I would not find fault in that. Scale matters.
- stavros 8mo agoIt's not that we got hooked on YouTube (that would maybe be ok in a free market), it's that YouTube used "free" to make itself a monopoly. That's what the issue is, that you have no other options now.
- anonymous908213 8mo agoGoogle is the richest company literally on the entire planet, you really don't need to go to bat for monopolistic practices.
- tjpnz 8mo agoNo worse than what a lot of their other "brilliant" minds are working on - ads.
- throwaway132448 8mo agoWhataboutism is just fascinating. How myopic must your world view be that when you see one bad thing, you immediately try to justify it by pointing out another bad thing?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jy14898 8mo agoWhile I'm not pro YouTube, I think it's fine for companies to decide how to monetise their product, including things which were originally free. If you don't like free services, stop using them
- reddalo 8mo ago>If you don't like free services, stop using them Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.
- sneak 8mo agoThat’s not remotely true.
- reddalo 8mo agoOkay, so list which websites I can use to watch all kinds of content that I can find on YouTube. Vimeo? It's basically dead. DailyMotion? It could've been an alternative, but they've recently deleted most old videos. Peertube? Nice idea in theory, but lack of content.
- lombasihir 8mo agois use yewtu.be from time to time on web, and pipepipex on android.
- reddalo 8mo agoDo you realize that those are just wrappers for YouTube, not a real competitor?
- lombasihir 8mo agoyup, not a problem for me. ----- > Okay, so list which websites I can use to watch all kinds of content that I can find on YouTube. it serve this purpose.
- keepamovin 8mo agoMaybe ads-as-business-model is like political ideology - it is not a human universal but must adapt to the place: for instance collectivism over individualism in East Asia, theocratic conservatism over democracy in Afghanistan -- maybe ads as business model is despicable to some regions, but accepted in others? Albania it's apparently illegal for YouTube to serve ads?
- isthatafact 8mo agoWithout regulations, ads seem to infiltrate into every space--virtual or physical--that is not controlled by the owner or some other gatekeeper. I would hope most people anywhere would see that as a bad thing, especially given the scams and harms that ads are pushing. I am not sure the best way to improve things, but anyone should be able to live a normal day of life without being forced to see any advertisement.
- latexr 8mo ago> Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet Maybe we should stop with that tired fallacious rhetoric? Just because you work at a massive company doesn’t make you “brilliant”.
- freedomben 8mo agoGP did not say that just because you work at a massive company you are brilliant. Nor did they say just working at Google makes you brilliant. The irony of your comment of accusing them of using fallacious rhetoric, is that your reply uses one of the most common fallacies of all: strawman fallacy
- latexr 8mo agoGP assumed “the most brilliant engineers” are working on these problems. There’s zero reason to believe that is true and the one thing we know about those people is that they work for Google. Their argument isn’t new, it’s just a rehash of “the most brilliant minds of our generation are working on trying to get you to click on ads”. My criticism was directed at the general argument, which is simply wrong. That comment is based on nothing except those people working at those corporations. It is not a strawman because I am disagreeing with the conclusion as quoted, the reasoning being immaterial.
- causalscience 8mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 8mo ago> Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet I am not sure those who work at Google are all brilliant - but it should also not matter, because they support Evil here. They should be ashamed for working for Evil. Guess if the money is right ...
- testfrequency 8mo agoApple has entered the chat
- AlienRobot 8mo agoAgreed. I was leaving the mall with lots of great goods I had found, but then the guard stopped me and told me I was stealing! Imagine paying that guy a salary just to blackmail me into paying them! This is an outrage.
- slvng 8mo agoThe best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.
- speedgoose 8mo agoThey may have been extremely competent at this, but if they decided to spend years of their relatively short ephemeral life on such a useless project, perhaps they weren’t the best at the time. Perhaps they needed money and were focusing on family life, I don’t know. Who I am to judge? I’m judging though.
- snakeboy 8mo agoWell, nobody needs Google-level money...
- malicka 8mo agoI would like to add they waated their time on something evil, not useless. Can’t say I blame them too much for cashing that check, though.
- blell 8mo agoWhy is that useless as opposed to what most of us do for work? I think you guys have a weird sense of how useful the average job is, or how much the average job contributes to society at large. At least this made a lot of money I guess.
- alternatex 8mo agoYou can create a lot of profit for your employer whilst contributing nothing to society or even be detrimental to it. Money has no bearing on that.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoThey can take the skill to any other employer and improve performance for others elsewhere. Think of all the seconds you could get back to do more meaningful things if more websites were fully optimized. It may sound silly but it snowballs into minutes, hours, and days.
- stavros 8mo ago> At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour. This is where their most brilliant engineers have bested you, because they control the client too.
- bpavuk 8mo agoand my answer is Firefox! (maybe also Ladybird and Servo in distant future)
- stavros 8mo agoI agree with you there. Anything non-Chrome is better than Chrome.
- lostmsu 8mo agoCurrently Firefox on Android doesn't play YouTube videos in background. UPD found https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-background-play-fix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/video-backgro... elsewhere in the thread
- Buttons840 8mo agoIt's a testament to the health of our free markets and competition that the winning move here is to spend a lot of time and money making your product worse for the average person.