GeekyNerdyNerd @ GeekyNerdyNerd @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

I like Snowden as much as any terminally online person does, but I don't think his quote is really the best as it supposes there are people with nothing to hide. Everyone has something to hide, if for no other reason than out of embarrassment.

There's a reason why we close the bathroom door despite the fact that everyone knows we are taking a shit.

I was a young child during the napster days, and by the time my parents had anything better than dial-up iTunes had already taken off.

Maybe I'm less into music than most people, maybe most are music enthusiasts who actually take full advantage of all the music, all the time, for a low monthly rate thing but i mostly listen to the same small handful of artists with only the occasional breakout towards newer things. If Spotify and YouTube Music were both to die all I'd have to do is spend a larger amount upfront but then I'd be back to pretty much the status quo, and without the monthly bill. So for me any sort of significant changes in price or quality of service completely negate the sole reason I bother with music streaming and that is convenience and cost.

I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist

Except what made the product attractive to the consumer are the very things making it unprofitable. Minimal ads, unlimited streaming of any and all music you want. Without that might as well stick to terrestrial radio, at least that doesn't use up your mobile data.

What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?

The point you dismissed as a "nice sentiment in abstract" applies here: it's completely irrelevant to the consumer. If Spotify dies we will just go to Apple/Amazon/Youtube Music, and if they all die that's then iTunes and MP3s get to make a comeback.

Spotify's profitability is Spotify's problem,, no-one else's.

The only immaturity I see is the person throwing around ageist ad hominems in response to someone making a joke.

The luddites failed and the French revolutions ended poorly for everyone. Not exactly the best examples to draw from if you are trying to encourage violent rebellion.

Except for the fact that people literally do change age from day to day. Another day older.

Well if we can't tax 'em we could always literally eat them, and if we can't afford food thanks to them killing the good paying jobs then maybe we will just have to eat them literally if we can't tax them properly.

Another thing that would help would be banning shorting stocks. Shorting makes it more profitable for investors to take a stable, profitable company that isn't experiencing exponential growth and intentionally run it into the ground than it would be to simply let it generate long term revenues.

It's obscene that we haven't banned it and acts like it writ large. It simply shouldn't be legal to sell somebody else's property that they've loaned to you with the intention of buying another one once the price drops. It provides absolutely no value to society, is incredibly risky, and creates perverse market incentives where economic recessions and market crashes can be more profitable for some than the good times.

We do actually. Just last year new york passed the Concealed Carry Improvement act imposing a background check on ammunition purchases. This bill is completely redundant and unnecessary.

Except for the fact that they aren't replacing keywords on the user end, simply matching advertiser keywords to a broader range of keywords specifically for the ad results.

Claiming they are replacing user keywords for higher value ones is absolutely incorrect, which is what the article they got that info from specifically claimed before it was retracted.

They aren't taking watch searches and showing only luxury brand results, they are taking luxury watch searches and showing generic ads for "watches" alongside the relevant search results through the normal Algorithm which ties to find what it thinks is most relevant to those keywords.

That latter one is something all search engines do and without doing so they wouldn't be very useful to the average person who doesn't know about search operators and advanced search refining tools.. Simple keyword matching is too easily tricked by the SEO industry.

but google is editing your queries without your knowledge, so they can milk more money out of their advertisers.

That came from a wired article which was quietly retracted because the author had misunderstood a slide from the Google anti trust trial and had the meaning nearly backwards.

What Google is actually doing is allowing advertisers to match keywords to common synonyms and other relevant keywords. If you search for (insert brandname) infant sleepwear for example Google will also show ads from adverts from companies who selected the keywords "baby pajamas". And that specific keyword replacement was only relevant to advertising"..

Google has long been transparent about the fact they interpret the meaning of keywords for searches to try to improve their relevance, and if you think about it if Google was replacing low value keywords with higher value ones it would be obvious, as generic searches would only turn up stuff from luxury brands and ads wouldn't have broad keyword matching.

There are plenty of things to blame Google for, the low return on advertising that publishers get and the increasing need for the entire Internet to be locked behind millions of different paywalls, SEO optimization, click bait bullshit, link farms, but one of them isn't replacing keywords to maximize value.

Ah yes lemme just shell out $50 dollars a month or more just so I can use my steam deck to play multiplayer games over the slow and spotty mobile network that exists where I live. That's a totally reasonable thing to do.

Or I can just continue to pay 15 bucks a month and use my steam deck offline while still getting decent enough service and enough data to do everything I'd actually be able to reliably do on a mobile network outside of a large city.

Mobile networks ain't reliable and not every plan permits the mobile hotspot feature to function. That was my entire point with that comment.

That when when your device is unlocked your carrier still gets to decide if that particular feature is even functional.

That assumes hotspot is included in your wireless plan,, and it isn't included in a lot of the cheapest ones.

The German government literally ruled otherwise. You are objectively, legally,, and morally incorrect.

That logic is what will make verification cans a reality.

Do you have Firefox's tracker blocking enabled? That can block some advertising related code and as such will also get detected as an adblocker. I've had that be the issue for other websites that block ad blockers in the past before I stopped being willing to ever turn Ublock Origin off.