It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.

This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.

I’ve tried looking into that but I couldn’t get it working. It didn’t add any subscriptions to my feed. Going to the site now I don’t even seem to be able to click on anything. I just tried disabling my ad blocker and now I can click on stuff, but none of it won’t load any videos. Any idea what’s up with it? I’d love to be able to switch off YT if I can.

$10 million easy. Sure maybe you could get more if you were going back in time and insider trading on everything. But $10m is already enough money to live a comfortable life, especially if you just invest it in something safe. And that way you don’t need to go through school and puberty again.

Not that this has anything to do with Jan 6th since it was just right wingers throwing a hissy fit, but elections in America don’t work. People aren’t given real alternatives to the establishment through all sorts of structural barriers. The government doesn’t represent people’s interests to any statistically significant degree. When you consider the US’s efforts to coup left wing governments around the world, it’s easy to extrapolate that if we ever were to successfully elect someone who could enact real change, the military/intelligence agencies would step in to stop them.

You don’t need to defend our broken system just to call right wingers fascists. If anything their prominence is an indictment of our system. That our government is more open to people who want to subjugate the majority of the country and violate our supposed constitutional rights than people who represent the majority of the country tells you all you need to know about American “democracy.” And before you say it, no, it’s not because a lot of people want fascism, they’re still in the minority by far, but our electoral process is set up to favor them over more majoritarian interests.

I don’t think that’s entirely true. Or at least not in the longer term view of it. YT isn’t just some random store that doesn’t want to deal with an unruly customer. It’s a big tech monopoly platform. Like the other tech giants, their strategy has always hinged on becoming the only game in town. And they predictably use the same tactics monopolies have been using for the past century:

1. Offer the product at such a low price that you take a loss and use your hoard of money to outlast would-be competitors who don’t have a massive pot of money to burn. In YT/Google terms this is the fact that it’s a free site and up until very recently they’ve done little to nothing about adblocking users despite being one of the biggest tech companies in the world, knowing it is happening, (It was in their chrome extensions search, plus they don’t pay the creators for the no-ad views.) and having the capability to stop it at least for their browser, which a lot of people were already using. Why not go to war with adblockers sooner when their entire business is built on advertising? Because that’s the cost they were willing to bear to turn YT into a monopoly. They could take the hit on not getting ad revenue from some users, but some hypothetical competitor certainly couldn’t.

2. Make switching hard. A site that’s grown as large as YT has massive network effects. For viewers, that’s where all the videos are. For creators that’s where all the viewers are. For both that’s where there is enough of a community that there are lively discussions in comments. Nobody outside nerds like us is going to some external site they’ve never heard of. If you want to get your stuff out there, you use YT. Then there are things like creator contracts to further discourage switching.

Ad block users aren’t valueless to YT, or at least they weren’t. They were a portion of those viewers and commenters that contributed to YT becoming THE video social media site. They comment, share videos around, maybe even contribute directly to creators to allow them to keep making YT video. You maybe lose a out on a couple cents from the lost ad views for each one of them, but the value of the network effect gained by keeping them around this long far outweighs that loss.

EDIT: Oh and how could I forget: They get data from you. Sure, they can’t directly sell ads for you off that data, but the more data they have in general, the better they are able to make predictions about other similar users, which is valuable.

They’re doing this now because they can. They no longer have meaningful competition to kill off. The few that kinda cross into their market are also massive tech platform monopolies that are currently engaged in the exact same thing. They can’t expand their customer base anymore, so now they’re extracting more money from the captive audience they have.

And it’s not just adblock users they’re increasing the “price” for. YT has added an insane number of ads to their videos and increased the price of YT Premium. If adblockers died tomorrow, they wouldn’t be like “What a relief, now that we’ve gotten rid of the freeloaders, we can finally lower our prices for everyone since they aren’t bearing the burden of the non-payers.” They just get to tighten the screws even further because they would have gained an even more dominant position over their users.

In a fairer world, we’d all pay a reasonable amount for the things we use or move on to an alternative if we’d rather not. But we don’t live in that world. We live in capitalist hell world where everything is a monopoly and the government is so captured by those corporate interests that they basically never enforce even the meager anti-trust laws we do have.

Because he’s right wing? This isn’t that complicated. People only get killed for actually threatening the gravy train. If this were another country the US would have backed the coup. Im still not convinced this will end with anything more serious than Trump getting a vacation in rich people jail.

It feels telling of corporate media that they chose to frame the company under suspicion of fraud complaining about the government investigation ruining their profits as a “warning.” As though they’re experts reporting on their predictions about a natural phenomenon or a policy proposal and not… you know… the criminals crying foul.

Users who don’t directly pay for a social service where user content and interaction is the business are still valuable. They share videos around, they comment, they contribute to it being the place where everything is happening. There’s a reason all these tech platform companies spent so long in the honeymoon phase of monopolization. Without the network effect of people on their platform, they have nothing.

They still need a way to overall make profit from their users, but they aren’t losing nothing by losing people who adblock.

Biden, and any US president, is pro-military industrial complex. Anything that lets them sell more weapons and increase US hegemony is what their ideology is.

Oppressive systems passively inflict violence on the oppressed. Artificial lack of access to basic necessities like food, shelter, healthcare hurts or even kills people. Getting over policed gets people hurt or killed.

The absence of war isn’t the same thing as the absence of conflict. The conflict is built into the structure of a hierarchical society. It’s just only felt by some. A war brings the conflict to the surface to make those who the system supports feel the pain of those who it does not.

The government could give in and create a more just society for everyone and the conflict would be resolved. The oppressed giving in only benefits those in power. They go back to passively experiencing systemic violence.

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Submitting to an oppressive government is not peace.

One of these “sides” could unilaterally peacefully end the conflict. For the other side choosing “peace” just means submitting to living under an occupying force as eternal second class citizens. insert mlk quote here.

I’m basically a hermit.

It only works the other way around because the money supports the right wing. Nobody’s gonna fund a secret lefty on the republican ticket.

It’s crazy how successful they’ve been off just making and selling a good indie game. They’re still doing free updates AND they can afford a $200k donation?

For me, I don’t support what Russia is doing. I just don’t want to further empower the US military industrial complex. Every couple of years there needs to be a new evil enemy for us to be scared of so that the money can keep flowing into weapons and so that we have excuses to extract value out of other countries in conflict. It’s obvious we don’t do this for humanitarian reasons or we wouldn’t be allies with countries like Saudi Arabia (or see the entire history of US intervention since WWII). Whether Russia wins or loses the war, people in Ukraine aren’t winning, they’re just seeing which imperialists are going to be exploiting them for the near future.

In the abstract I don’t oppose assisting countries against imperialist aggression with military force. But playing into US warmongering doesn’t really do that and in the process is further making the world a worse place.