251–254 of 254 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla is looking into becoming more independent from Google by introducing paid services, such as ad-free content subscriptions using Scroll, Pocket, VPN... Their approach relies on acquisitions (Pocket) or partnerships/experiments (Scroll). The language used by them when referring to Google has changed quite a lot in the past year or so.
But by doing so are at risk of becoming that which they hate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But what does that mean? YouTube keeps a history list, which I download and periodically reset. If it didn't I would need to add some sort of Firefox add-on that remembered which videos I'd seen. What else are they "tracking"? Does YouTube have tracking on other sites (like Facebook, Twitter etc)? I haven't seen anything like that. You can switch the history off, I presume that would work even without Premium, but it…
if youtube isn't tracking me in malicious way, why would I pay them to stop them from tracking me? but the error here is conflating a tool with a legal person. Google will track me no matter how much I pay them for any of their services, including YouTube. the situation at the moment is that no-one believes that a corporation who offers a free service is going to not track you because you pay for the premium version.…
I personally think a better way to sell YouTube Premium wouldn't be to focus on just the ads, yes that should be a part of it, but consumers have shown they want certain things in particular (via Patreon):
1. A way to support their favourite creators (adblock whitelisting proves people care more about creators than the downsides of ads - I do for sure)
2. A way to get exclusive content in return, or maybe just a shoutout.
Super Chat is one of the best things YouTube has ever done in this regard. It's amazing how much money flows through to creators when they do live-streams & premiere events.
A lesson can be learned from Steam's fight with piracy wrt ad-free versions. You've either got to:
1. Make it an easier sell to purchase YouTube Premium than to get AdBlock (not-likely)
2. Make a significant value-add for the premium offering "be a better service than piracy".
The problem is that YouTube's not been doing too well with option two, and they're simultaneously making their advertising products a worse sell for business customers.
I'm very interested to see how they adapt to the changing market though.
If this tweet is accurate, Apple's choices here are pretty hard to explain as anything but "leverage / abuse mobile phone monopoly to kneecap competitors", especially because nowhere in this document does it actually describe how this makes users' lives better in any concrete, specific way https://mobile.twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1161779661644...
I find it easy to explain that Apple is not using a mobile phone monopoly to X, for any X, by virtue of the fact that Apple does not have a mobile phone monopoly, not even close. If I want Google ad tracking on my phone, I have a bewilderingly large selection of Android phones to choose from, all of which run on the same mobile networks as my iPhone, work with the same Internet, and all of the apps I consider part of…
Monopolies abuse their power. Apple abuses its power. This doesn't make Apple a monopoly but it isn't any less of a problem.
Strange for a page espousing anti-tracking [0] to load media in from apple.com. Granted Mozilla's page [1] is even a worse offender with google-analytics and newrelic embeds. Really makes you think what really drives the underlying narrative for such initiatives at corporates if not sabotaging competitors? OpenDNS founder, u/davidu, pointed out that DNS over HTTPS, something that takes aim at trackers and advocates p…
At least for your second point https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14