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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 13th, 2023

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  • No one wants to scale enough to compete.

    I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT’s offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.

    It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.

    Scale is the concern of middlemen.



  • In addition to reducing the volume of waste being created

    That will amount to a cynical coercion of the public in some way. I’m being forced to work for free in the form of sorting waste at point of disposal, and worrying about fines, all so that industry’s line can continue going up. So that plastics production growth can largely continue on trend. Paper and plastic recycling are like cycling up the hill of environmental conservation in top gear. Loads of pedal revolutions that (ultimately) only slow the rate of decline back down the hill.

    If the product has a high energy cost involved in new production, that’s when industry actually does the right thing. Aluminum is a great example. Generous deposit schemes are found all over the world. They’re voluntary and well managed. But paper and plastic are cheap to manufacture by comparison, and the costs can be passed through to the consumer, so industry and government conspire to do just that (the mechanisms of which are then greenwashed).









  • Reddit will program new mod bots to deal with organic responses the advertiser doesn’t consider constructive. That opens another revenue stream: charging advertisers for sub-specific bot tweaks.

    The interesting question to me is, when does normie realize his sub has been co-opted to function as a focus group, and decide to look for a new forum.






  • The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.

    I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.