MudMan

That’s a hugely disingenuous counterargument. It doesn’t so much move the goalposts as sets them on fire over a pile of explosives and puts them somewhere in low orbit.

To that question the genuine answer is “what the OP is proposing is not a boycott”, then.

None of these “don’t support them with your money” online liberal fantasies are boycotts by the standards you’re setting. If anything, going back to those examples to get a grasp on what an actual boycott looks like in the context of larger action only exposes to what degree this nonsense isn’t that.

Had to look up Delano, but I’m not surprised to find that it was apparently not a boycott, but a larger organized, ongoing labor conflict. I knew about Montgomery (which in itself is a crazy sign of cultural imperialism, because I have no business knowing that), and the same applies.

You can set up a genuine boycott of something as part of a larger set of organized actions, particularly in a local conflict. You can’t rely on consumers worldwide spontaneously abandoning a global oligopoly as a way to enact any meaningful change. At most you’ll get a PR response. At most.

No, it doesn’t matter. There are infinite good and bad guys. They all can spawn a second before each other until the big bang. You can assume the friendlies aren’t complete morons and have set up some encrypted comms, although presumably that itself is in its own time loop of decryption and re-encryption itself, since you effectively have infinite time to both track down and decrypt any code.

The real answer is time travel makes no sense.

There is no first. Time travel! Just keep going back. Hell, screw telling my future friends about coming to pick me up, tell them to tell me where I got jumped so I can avoid it and I don’t even have to be here in the first place.

I will Primer the crap out of this situation if there are time machines. I will Primer the crap out of every situation if you let me have a time machine.

I set up like a million dead drops, craigslist entries and graffitti telling the other time travellers to come pick me up where I am. As long as one makes it I will get an instant pickup materializing next to me instantly and can carry whatever server rack I’m salvaging inside their DeLorean or TARDIS or whatever. Bonus points, I get to survive. Extra bonus points, let’s go to the place the other guys jumped me and bootstrap their asses into the curb.

I get that the idea is chatting about how to preserve data, but time travel breaks every premise if you think about it for two minutes.

All the examples you provide already have alternate hosting methods they publicise aggressively. LTT has Floatplane, which they own, DF offers Patrons higher bitrate alternative to their videos for download, GN pushes people to their website (although that’s different and not really monetized) and a whole bunch of other creators banded together and made Nebula as an alternative to Youtube.

My understanding is that the vast majority of those alternatives from successful, established creators are residual, secondary monetization windows when compared to Youtube advertising and sponsorships driven pretty much entirely by Youtube views.

I do agree that Youtube is a huge aberration. Every other dominant streaming site is built on owned or licensed content, not UGC, and they’re largely supported by subscription revenue first, advertising second. Definitely not by third party sponsorships baked right into the UGC. It is what it is, though, and if it got shut down tomorrow I genuinely don’t know that independently generated content would survive in any form at all. Maybe someone would ramp up capacity to try to replace them, but most likely you’d see social media posts becoming the real replacement.

Much as my feelings for Youtube are mixed, I don’t know if I can think of a realistic alternative that isn’t worse.

I read it. I disagree with your interpretation.

It’s a DMCA issue in that the current set of regulations puts the onus on the poster and the effective enforcement on the platform.

Sure, Youtube is way less zealous in protecting the rights of the genuine content creators than those of even illegitimate claimants… but that’s by design. If they make a mistake and enforce too strictly they will not likely get sued at all, and if they do the damages will be low. If they do the opposite on a large scale the threat, at the time the DMCA was being hashed out, was becoming directly liable for any and all copyrighted content they host by accident.

The regulation isn’t fit for purpose and never has been. Google’s extreme lack of diligence in protecting the public domain (and whatever copyright exceptions are applicable) is a result of this. I don’t like Google or their practices in general. They definitely don’t spend enough on direct support, be it on copyright or on security issues. In this case, being honest with you, I’d err on the same side they do, even if there is a secondary issue with how little funding they put on required support and assessment of edge cases beyond their algorithmic solutions.

Not so much a Youtube issue as a modern copyright issue.

But I’m curious, is that recommendation meant for users or creators? And don’t say “both”, I know it’s a chicken and egg thing, I’m asking what you think comes first.

No, it can’t. It’s an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn’t play out in reality.

This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.

It just doesn’t work like that. The way it works is I don’t like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.

What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don’t have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.

And if that’s not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.

If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That’s all well and good. But don’t fool yourself and others by pretending it’s an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It’s neither.

Clearly not special for Germany, since the entire article is… entirely about Spain, actually.

The option highlighted here is very interesting, but as a test of reacting to headlines vs clicking through it’s an amazing case study. The German thing is a quote from a Spanish seller of this tech explaining why he’s confident it will take off.

We don’t have to agree to disagree, it’s measurable. You just don’t have enough capital to make a dent before large numbers and market forces make it impossible to have an effect. That’s why we have governments and regulations in the first place. “Vote with your wallet” is part of the anarchocapitalist fiction that free markets self-regulate by way of the public acting on them through their consumption choices affecting supply and demand. It just doesn’t happen, demonstrably.

Real collective power is, ideally, enacted through those regulations under a rule of law. Governments made of people and acting on their behalf get to coerce rich assholes into following rules. It’s also collective action, like collective bargaining through unions enforced by a right to strike protected by the government.

If your republic has failed to do these things it gets trickier and you get into the territory of forcing reform through protest, mass disobedience or general strike. And yes, in extreme cases eventually revolution, but man, people online sure like to misrepresent how quickly or effectively through revolution because waiting for revolution is easier than actually doing the work.

I find Americans in particular are surprinsingly reticent to acknowledging this for a place that sacralizes both their foundational moment and several key historical landmarks, all enacted through these means. Nobody ever remembers the Great Burker King Boycott of 1972 or whatever. How is this even a debate.

Yep. Because your vote is not based on how much capital you have, but assigned (more or less) equally across the population.

I did the math. The average US-ian’s vote counts as much as Elon Musk’s (if they live in the same state). On average their “wallet vote” counts 0.00002% as much as Musk’s. Even before he bought the presidency, by the way, just as a matter of purchasing power.

Where do you think you have more of an effect?

Again, voting with your wallet has exactly zero value. Your money is a rounding error compared to your vote and your direct political action.

Yes it is. What other company for payment management will you find? It’s an extremely narrow oligopoly, and that’s even counting the credit card agencies that suck just as much as PayPal.

You have zero agency as an economic player. Exactly zero.

You won’t impact PayPal getting richer by researching a different coupon provider than Honey. That’s not how this is going to play out at any point in time.

You don’t enact change by leveraging the breadcrumbs of an income you have as a salaried worker. You do so by leveraging real collective power in an organized, effective manner. As a player in government (by voting or holding office, because running is also part of democracy) or as a non-government organization. Those are your options. Anything else is whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for activism.

No, it’s like giving the horse a sugar cube where you own exactly one of the grains of sugar, taking your grain of sugar away and pretending you’ve made a difference.

Or, you know, banning plastic straws.

You’re absolutely wrong about two party systems in any case, even those have tons of elected roles in different layers of governance where changes matter. And that’s also where the collective action comes in. Your feel-good token choices of companies and services to avoid haven’t done anything in the past thirty years and aren’t going to start now.

No. What? No.

Unless you publish sci-fi novels as a business, I suppose. Then maybe. But no.

I don’t have anything against “culture fit”, but that means that if you think someone will make your life miserable by sharing a space for eight hours it’s okay to go with someone else. It’s not a blank check to audit people’s Spotify histories. Job interviews aren’t dates.

See, this isn’t viable.

This is the “ban plastic straws” of late stage capitalism. Overrepresenting individual action to distract from the need of structural reform.

Stop voting with your wallet, it’s pointless. Consumption is not expressing support. Vote with your votes, if you’re in a place where you have a chance to do so, find other ways to organize collective action if you don’t.

I’m fuzzy on the timeline, but it was definitely THE search engine for a while. And I’d say the one that’s most memory-holed. I feel like Yahoo’s unlikely survival as some vestigial online service made people remember it and I guess Americans in particular had an Ask Jeeves moment at some point? For me it was Altavista until Google, for sure, and they were trading blows for a good while. I almost remember Gmail being the thing that tipped the scales more than the search quality.

Well, yeah, there are multiple things feeding into the results page they generate for you. Not just two. There’s the search results, there’s an algorithmic widget that shows different things (so a calculator if you input some math, a translation box if you input a translation request, a summary of Wikipedia or IMDB if you search for a movie or a performer, that type of thing). And there is a pop-up window with an LLM-generated summary of the search results now.

Those are all different pieces. Your search resutls for “3 divided by 7” aren’t different because they also pop up a calculator for you at the top of the page.

The LLM is going over the search results, taking them as a prompt and then generating a summary of the results as an output.

The search results are generated by the good old search engine, the “AI summary” option at the top is just doing the reading for you.

And of course if the answer isn’t trivial, very likely generating an inaccurate or incorrect output from the inputs.

But none of that changes how the underlying search engine works. It’s just doing additional work on the same results the same search engine generates.

EDIT: Just to clarify, DDG also has a “chat” service that, as far as I can tell, is just an UI overlay over whatever model you select. That just works the same way as all the AI chatbots you can use online or host locally and I presume it’s not what we’re talking about.

So we’re talking about SEO and the content being generated in the first place? Yeah, it’s worse than it used to be when the main application online was websites, but I still want/need a reliable way to parse results across… you know, Wikipedia and Reddit, mostly. IMDB sometimes. It may have looped around to the old days of Altavista directory search, but it’s still a valuable tool. And crucially not replaced by an LLM, especially for the kind of non-obvious queries where you don´t just go to the site you know will have the answer directly.