NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


nicky
@nicky

i try not to think about how much stuff is put on the internet solely to get you to see some advertisements. maybe 50? 60%? of youtube at this point is content slop made purely to get ad revenue. everything is ads. it makes me miserable and i can't wait for the collapse of the ad industry


pervocracy
@pervocracy

I just wonder how thinly spread ads can get. Like, at the end of the day, there's a limit to how many actual products are being purchased. Everyone's fighting over a finite and slow-growing pool of disposable income, and meanwhile the number of places online serving ads is skyrocketing. I'm no economologist but it seems like the natural consequence of this is that ad prices on everything short of the Superbowl fall to $0.000000001 per million impressions.

Producing and serving slop these days is cheap, but it's not free. There has to be a tipping point at which "sure, the margins are low, but the quantity is unlimited" breaks and it's no longer worth even the very small effort it takes to put shock images on a Taboola feed.

(Also, generative AI is artificially underpriced right now. That will not last forever. It's going to be a lot harder for people to flood the Web with slop if the slop machine costs five cents per query.)

We're not getting the Old Internet back, but I have hope we're going to get something besides a world wallpapered with ads, if only because wallpaper isn't free.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

i don't think I've bought anything from a sponsorship or targeted ad basically ever, and if anything they turn me away from whatever people are selling because it's clear their marketing budget is higher than their QC / paying factory workers budget so it'll break in four years or turn out to contain dangerous amounts of cadmium or whatever

that said, even small channels get paid 10k USD to do a sponsorship slot, and it's basically the only way to make a living on YouTube so I at least understand those. i guess.


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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

I pay for YouTube Premium and frankly it’s the best subscription service I’m signed up for. I’ve managed to get their recommendation algorithm firmly embedded in the cooking + woodworking + machining + math nerdery + foreign languages + trains + lefty video essays local minimum and I never have to have bullshit right-wing content infiltrate my feed via the ads.

same although honestly I'm kind of mad about it--I don't feel like I paid for a service, I feel like they finally made the ads so annoying they pushed me into it. but I watch a lot of YouTube and decided I'd rather give the bastards money than go cold turkey

(and same with the algorithm, though that was also true before I paid; it seems pleasantly convinced that I enjoy science and nature and film criticism [good kind] and really doesn't trouble me with "hollywood gone WOKE" content at all)

The saga of Cohost and the utter chaos of the Fediverse have convinced me that “the site is usually up and running, it serves me posts / toots / video / images, and I can curate what I see while reporting bad actors” is itself a service worth paying for. YouTube doesn’t let me report bad actors, but it has the other features so I’m only a little mad about paying for Premium.