I stopped using streaming platforms personally and just went back to pirating music. Personally I don’t want to support Spotify because they continue to support far-right ideology with their podcasts, but that’s a completely personal decision.

Since at least a couple of years ago - it requires a bit of jumping through hoops, but it’s 100% worth it to get ad-free YouTube on iPhone!

You can do it in any country as far as I know, it’s not EU-only.

Yeah, of course - you should do what you think is best. I was thinking that if everyone cancels their YT Premium and signs up for a few Patreons, distributed as randomly as possible (which is why I said to go for the smaller creators) then overall creators would get more money, while we’d still be paying less. Everyone wins - except Google, but fuck Google!

There’s probably quite a bit of content still that is playing “World of Warcraft” but it’s more like a “just chatting” kind of stream, if you know what I mean - WoW is a safe, comfy game to have on in the background while talking about other stuff.

Ah, sorry, that’ll teach me to read more carefully. Thanks for pointing it out <3

It’s hard to get exact numbers from WoW because they’re not publicly available. You might be right that WoW is still the biggest, I found some other numbers that disagree. WoW’s twitch numbers seem to be way higher.

I’ll edit my comment

If you use iOS devices for watching YouTube, look into side-loading uYou+, it’s basically an edited YouTube app that removes most of the ads. You can stream from your phone to the apple TV, too, also without ads. You don’t need a jailbroken phone or anything like that.

If your main reason for paying premium is for ad blocking, I’d suggest just cancelling it now and using ad blockers. If you want to support creators, I’d say that it’s better to cancel and subscribe to a few patreons - I’d pick some of the smaller creators you like, to spread some of that support around a bit.

If you use iOS devices for watching YouTube, look into side-loading uYou+, it’s basically an edited YouTube app that removes most of the ads. You can stream from your phone to the apple TV, too, also without ads.

Not sure what the android equivalent is, but someone else will know - hopefully they will share in the comments also.

and Google used to care about not being evil.

Corporations will ALWAYS enshittify a platform they control. It’s simply a matter of time.

Reddit was almost exactly the same, and that did very little to help anyone

It’s really hard to know for sure, because Blizzard don’t release statistics, but according to ActivePlayer.io, Final Fantasy XIV has more active players than World of Warcraft.

But there are other websites which put World of Warcraft in the lead. It’s also worth mentioning that World of Warcraft has much higher twitch statistics than FFXIV.

Reddit was the same, you know. It didn’t matter

It’s obvious to me that we need to have laws to enforce portability of data and interoperability for large platforms.

Because the concept of federation is still impenetrable to a layperson

To be fair, it was probably some hardware issue. I had endless problems with my old Nvidia GTX 580 which I would have been using at the time. And yeah, it was quite a while ago :P

Thanks for the really comprehensive reply. The feeling I’m kind of getting from these comments is that neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet. I know that GIMP is capable and fully featured, but when I last tired it, I could not bear how much it crashed or locked up, and like you implied, the default UI is absolutely fucking garbage. Being totally honest, I don’t think it’s defensible how bad it is - Photoshop lets you customise the UI way, way more than you probably think, it has easily half a dozen preset layouts for different tasks/workflows.

Krita looks quite nice, giving it a quick look, but like you said, it’s very obviously designed for painting and not design. Not all design can be done in vector format unfortunately!

Maybe I will get around to giving GIMP 3 a shot and trying to figure out how to use it. I want an open source replacement to the Adobe suite so, so badly. But I feel like I just can’t make the huge compromises required for that, yet.

So, real talk, be completely honest with me - how usable is GIMP these days? I’m not trying to pick a fight, I think it’s great that GIMP exists, but while I may not be a professional artist, I am a developer with an interest in graphical design and I would say that I am an advanced user of the Adobe Creative Suite tools - the main three that I use being Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

I would be willing to learn to use GIMP to replace Photoshop, and Inkscape to replace Illustrator, for example, but only if they’re actually good enough to put to real, productive use.

I need my tools to get out of the way and let me work. If it crashes and loses my work EVER, then it is completely beyond consideration for me. If it’s good enough for light users but not really ready for professional use, then I don’t think I can really consider switching.

I do not use any of the 3D or AI features of any of those tools, if that helps.

I would really appreciate your opinions and advice. Please don’t be optimistic - I know it’s hard sometimes to be critical about open source software because of our ideological beliefs, but please try your best to be realistic.

Oh, and if you’re going to just tell me to try it, please try to contain that impulse. It would be a huge undertaking for me to relearn basically everything about how I work with these tools, so if I went through all that just to find that I couldn’t actually make use of them because they’re not ready yet, it would be a huge waste of time and energy, both of which I have in quite short supply these days.

Thank you so much for your time :)

Out of curiosity, have you actually spoken to blind people about how useful they find Braille?

This doesn’t really make sense. Programmers are usually just paid a salary. My salary is the same regardless of how many subscribers there are. I don’t give a shit. If everyone started pirating everything it wouldn’t really impact my job. There’s plenty of dev work to do.

Free video sharing platforms are basically not viable as a business model. For a free and open internet to succeed, YouTube has to fail. At the moment, it only exists because Google subsidises it.

The ideal way for video sharing to work is for large content creators to set up their own federated video hosting websites (or pay for someone else to do it for them) and potentially offer some small amount of free capacity for those who want to upload small, not-for-profit videos