As someone who refuses to upgrade from Windows 10, it's because all the new and invasive features that 11 adds are things I refuse to go anywhere near. I don't need ads in my operating system, I don't need a system to track every action done on the computer, I don't need a slower user interface rewritten in the latest shiny framework and I certainly don't want any more Copilot integration.
Unfortunately, a lot of niche communities have decided to stick to developing for Windows machines no matter what (especially game development and modding ones), so using Linux isn't that practical about now.
Not even just regular Joe, a lot of the things large companies get away with would lead to far harsher consequences for small or medium sized ones. Any normal company spying on people's devices at the scale of Facebook, selling dodgy goods on the level Amazon does or ignoring guidelines in general like Uber and AirBnB used to would get absolutely wrecked by the legal system.
The system needs to be way more even when it comes to dealing with individuals and companies of every size possible.
Yeah good point. The question is how can we effectively change incentives in such way the decision-makers in big corporations will feel they are taking a personal risk that can ruin their lives instead of a situation where the worst that can happen is a (compared to revenue) tiny symbolic fine made by the company and not by them?
For me the important thing is that the buck needs to stop somewhere human in certain cases. And in doubt that should be the CEO, potentially even multiple people at once.
If we want a free market where new players can enter and compete, big corporations needs to fear harsher punishment not lighter ones.
Let's not forget the frustrations of an online system disabling the ability to select anything other than 'all' the text in a paragraph/text area/whatever.
So many times I've needed simplify the data provided by an embed code or share link for some reason (usually a third party integration or API development), only to have found the site forcefully making me select way more than I ever needed to. It doesn't really change anything in the long run (since you can just copy it into any other text editor and get what you need there), but it's still an annoying extra step that shouldn't be needed nonetheless.
On the one hand, it's pretty clear that whatever moderation is being done on app stores like the App Store or Play Store is clearly not enough to handle the scams and frauds and fake apps found there. That apps that encourage illegal actions or blatantly infringe on others' IP rights are being waved right through by an apathetic and broken moderation process that seems more like an ineffectual box ticking exercise.
In that sense, "we're too big to care about the law" seems to be the order of the day for these companies, especially where app stores and advertisers are concerned.
At the same time though, I can't help but worry about the implications, since a fair amount of what they 'allow' is really just being allowed because it's best for the users and their freedom to use these systems. Yes there are dodgy search results, but that's because Google isn't manually approving every site that wants to be listed there. Yes things like malware exist, but that's a cost associated with the user being able to run whatever programs they want on their machine.
My worry is that their apathy towards issues that make them money (scam ads, scam apps on app stores, unmoderated marketplaces, etc) is also going to lead to them being required to turn all their services into walled gardens that kill user choice for 'safety'.
Yeah, and it's kinda depressing how hard it is to get people to accept that. Every community and group seems to operate under the assumption that anyone who's not 'successful' is too lazy or selfish to deserve it, and that those who are winning have to be the smartest, hardest working people around.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
Best only to worry about what you can control, no? If there are external and internal factors to your success then you should spend 100% of your time focusing on the internal ones, since these are the only ones where productive gains can be made.
Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
Seems like it's been taken down now, as have all URLs used for this scam. Hopefully it took less than 8 hours to do this, but hey, at least GitHub eventually did something.
I've always wondered why we don't see any platforms just remove the media while leaving the metadata, comments, ratings, etc intact. Like, is there some legal requirement that the idea itself has to be hard to find, or is it okay to just remove the media and let people keep discussing it?
It implies the service is lacking something, that it's deficient in specific tangible things you want but they don't have.
A generic 404 for something you don't even know exists won't leave a `video_title` sized hole in your heart and chip on your shoulder, and won't give competitors opportunities to serve your needs instead.
Legal requirement - probably not. Econophysical constraint - betcha. They mostly don't care about the discussion, or the content, or the idea, they care about keeping your eyeballs within a given rectangle until a bell rings.
I think there's definitely an argument to be made that Google needs YouTube downloaders to work in some capacity, since a lot of their biggest and most profitable creators rely on them. Think news outlets/streamers/YouTubers that analyse video game/film/TV show trailers, reaction channels, drama YouTubers and celebrity YouTubers, essay channels in general, etc. Very few of those can afford to record all their own footage for their videos, simply due to how much time and effort it'd take. They rely on things like longplay channels and official company channels posting trailers for material, and bring Google a ton of traffic in return.
So there's probably at least some calculation where they have to decide how much effort they're putting into cracking down on these things, simply because on the one hand they don't want to anger Hollywood and music labels, and on the other hand they don't want to kill off 3/4 of media analysis content on the platform.
There's also the fact a lot of creators will deliberately turn a blind eye to people reusing their video footage so long as they credited in return. For a lot of them, it's less work to just let people figure out how to get the footage from their channels than to set up a third party hosting service where you can officially download them.
Interesting to hear about the terms of service provision though. Wonder how well it would hold up now given that a lot of modern outlets use donations or paid subscriptions for financing rather than ads? I can see an outlet like 404 Media covering YouTube downloaders at some point because of that.
100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
Yep. It's why the only way most people get their hacked YouTube channels back is by begging the Team YouTube account on Twitter for help, and hoping enough people bother the staff there that something actually gets fixed.
If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
This remembers of the Youtube channel TRNGL [1]. They got banned from posting for some reason, and their channel was about to be deleted within a few days. They had no following, so they instead looked for bypasses to put a video publicly. They found that while their uploading rights were disabled, they were able to use Creator Studio to record a webcam video begging for help since nobody was hearing their pleas. They have ~200k subscribers too.
Unfortunately, a lot of niche communities have decided to stick to developing for Windows machines no matter what (especially game development and modding ones), so using Linux isn't that practical about now.