51–60 of 212 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While 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
>If you don't like free services, stop using them Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.
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.
*Allocating man-hours towards making sure that users actually pay for the service they're using, either via youtube subscription or ads
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serving requests is a feature of Youtube and if they don't want to serve your client... well you didn't pay for it anyway.
They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking. Can't say you have much of a choice between youtube and any other video provider that has the same content on it.
It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.
Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
Newpipe remains one of the best solutions for background playback. They do tend to move pretty quickly to patch "fixes" that YouTube throw in now and again. It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.
Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.
It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.
I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.
Oh well. Live and learn, YouTube.
This will be a positive if browsers (extensions?) allow the ability to spoof visibility by site. Most websites have no business knowing if they're in the foreground or background.
That's actually quite easy. onBlur, etc
This will be a positive if browsers (extensions?) allow the ability to spoof visibility by site. Most websites have no business knowing if they're in the foreground or background.
Browsers will “slow down” various aspects of pages when they’re not visible, like animations or timers, to save on battery usage on laptops or phones.
Even if your remove explicit APIs for backgrounding, pages can still use heuristics to detect anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If you don't like free services, stop using them Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.
That’s not remotely true.
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.
Will someone _please_ make a decent linux phone already so we can stop this nonsense.
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.