91–100 of 212 posts
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No worse than what a lot of their other "brilliant" minds are working on - ads.
Whataboutism 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?
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The best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.
They 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.
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.
The best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.
a) don't care
b) were desperate enough at the time, then, like that damn videogame, it sucked him in
it's too easy to get carried away by sheer technical complexity of optimization tasks, even if you are optimizing for bad.
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.
> 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 .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.
They 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.
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If a company wants to offer its service as a loss-leader to outlast its competitors who offered their services at a cost its users were willing to pay, then that company has no room to complain if people don't want to pay the last-game-in-town's jacked-up rates! There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.
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- fair use was also sot as permissive in that era! Web 2.0 coerced a legal shift -
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.
They 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a company wants to offer its service as a loss-leader to outlast its competitors who offered their services at a cost its users were willing to pay, then that company has no room to complain if people don't want to pay the last-game-in-town's jacked-up rates! There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.
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They were also somehow the only ones that offered music videos without being shut down.
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> 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 .
and my answer is Firefox! (maybe also Ladybird and Servo in distant future)
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I released a browserbox variant many years ago that could ensure background playback on YouTube. Despite multiple posts here and on PH, it never gained any traction. It seemed people were simply not interested in overcoming no background playback for free on every platform (including mobile). Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucki…
The issue isn't with the payment, it's that you've burnt a ton of money to extinguish all competition (by giving away stuff for free) and then, when you're a monopoly because of network effects, you lock it in and charge whatever you want. If YouTube allowed syndication with other websites, for example, so I could watch videos on whatever website I wanted (with an appropriate portion of the revenue going to YouTube),…
Hmmm, possible. How to test? Hard, given their monopoly status. Tho does Rumble offer paid subscriptions?
A small but perhaps weak counter to your thesis is that if people were really unwilling to negotiate with YouTube over cost/experience, why would they then so vehemently attempt to eradicate ads, rather that accepting them as a lesser cost than the subscription fee?
But I guess what you're really saying is that none of the costs YT deigns to levy is felt as fair by those complaining. Not the ads. Not the USD9 (?) / mo subscription, however localized. Thus it's not free-then-paid, it's "bad pricing" that's arming the militia? Were the pricing simply "fair" people would be happy to pay it. But what rational expectation could they have for a fair price? Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive, but IMO provide less range. I'm less convinced "fair price" is it the more I think about it, but there could be something there. How else would you expand that?
Good, self contained point overall. Tho I'm going to side with the psychological factor as I've experienced that in other domains where the monopoly is not a factor. And the "merely a fair price" argument hinges on a sense of rationality which appears conspicuously absent from the reactions. Emotional and ape logic, yes, but objective and economic rationality + empathy logic? No.