Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

---

Read more

Posts

161

Comments

3,582

Joined

2 yr. ago

Wow, rare case where the ABC actually did a better job reporting on Palestine than others. Link here. Where's the video, Guardian? Why do you insist on emphasising the completely irrelevant point that a different officer's body camera was taken, and repeatedly quote the police talking about it as "unauthorised", but fail to mention that the police have decided not to investigate the officer's brutal assault?

When you're falling behind the fucking ABC when it comes to reporting on this genocide, you seriously need to up your game.

I legitimately think they're impossible to explain. Not impossible to understand, mind you, but to explain. The only way to ever learn to play a board game is by playing it, preferably open-hand, and learning it step by step in practice.

I will check these out

FWIW the specific channels I recommended were mostly based on stalking your user profile and grabbing a couple I thought might interest you based on that. But I didn't have much to go on from your Lemmy history specifically. They weren't necessarily the first ones I'd recommend to someone in the general public, or to someone whose interests I knew better.

if only I could figure out how to use peertube

From my experience trying Peertube, its biggest problem for now is just...the server infrastructure of existing instances isn't very good. I got really bad buffering. Maybe better server-side encoding could have helped with that. Maybe they need stronger server hardware with better outbound network connections. Maybe I just need to find a more locally-hosted instance to me. Maybe it's something else. But the user experience was really not good. Which is a shame. As nice as Nebula's sort of worker-owned co-op model is, true federated video would be really nice for those of us not privileged enough to become a member of the exclusive club. YouTube being basically the only real option really sucks, and I'm sick of alternative options like Gfycat dying off and losing all their content.

From everything I've heard, they're already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.

As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don't get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that's far from unlikely, but which I would describe as "catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today", so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.

I mean yeah, the Australian Antarctic Territory (that we basically inherited from the UK, IIRC) is fucking massive. But it's also what we call an "external territory", so I wasn't counting it.

The internal territories are the Northern Territory (practically a state for our purposes here) and the Australian Capital Territory (similar to America's District of Columbia, but with real legislative representation!). Oh, and the Jervis Bay Territory, but for most practical intents and purposes that's another arm of the ACT.

I’ve never heard of dropout or nebula. At all

I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn't have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn't have.

Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook's pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it's mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.

Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over "creative differences" (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It's since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you're interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent "1 month without US tech giants" and the Nebula Plus follow-up "Which alternatives am I sticking with?" video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he's projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.

Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren't relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).

lol

Sincerely, Australia; where two states are bigger than Alaska, and all but 2 states and 1 of 2 real internal territories are bigger than itty-bitty Texas.

Why is the open source Chromium ranked worse than Google Chrome?

Who can be bothered to steal someone else's semi-skimmed milk anyway‽ Full cream or bust.

If you cannot see the difference between celebrating a win

But that's not what you're doing. You're saying we shouldn't be criticising the ABC for their wastefulness in choosing to go ahead with this case.

If you cannot see the difference between celebrating a win and defending the wastefulness of the loser i can't help you.

The ABC was called to defend, not prosecute a case, and they lost

They didn't have to defend. They wasted enormous resources in even trying. They both could and should have settled out of court over a year ago. The ABC wasted resources in choosing to run this case.

Why do you insist on defending the ABC here? They completely fucked up, multiple times, in multiple ways. They rolled over to genociders. Stop giving them credit by pretending that isn't an enormous fucking waste of resources.

wtf, you have to pay to see a beach? That's fuckin' unaustralian!

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

The ABC ran a bad case. It was bad from a legal standpoint. They lost it, and from the looks of it the judge didn't have to think very hard to weigh up which way it would go.

It was bad from a moral standpoint. Even if they had been legally allowed to do it, it was obvious from the beginning that they were bowing to terrorists (namely: the pro-Israel lobby) by ousting an anti-genocide journalist.

In what world is it not a waste to spend resources on a case that is both legally and morally dubiously?

It's pretty close to the capital, really. It's directly due east of the ACT. Maybe somewhere like Bateman's Bay would be a little closer, but not a huge amount, and I assume other practicalities (including existing uses) took priority.

These days it's a naval base, mainly.

Yeah it's a super weird place, administratively speaking.

It's treated like part of the ACT for some reasons, like federal elections, and receives most municipal services from the ACT government, but it is not part of the ACT for territory elections.

There's also basically no reason to ever go there unless you're in or supporting the military bases located there.

Oh yeah definitely. I just view that as a separate problem. Both are problems, but as I see it:

• Liability the platform is taking on
• Privacy the user is giving up

Well, no. The money that got spent on lawyers and court fees was definitely wasted. The ABC could have issued an apology and made a reasonable offer of settlement without the huge bill to the taxpayer.

Or, you know...just not fired her in the first place. But that would have required not kowtowing to the Israel lobby...

It's not easy, but you're not guaranteed to end up

either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break

It depends on the personalities involved and the business model they go with.

Nebula has done really well with consistent growth as a premium offering where people pay one subscription fee to get ad-free videos from exclusively high-quality creators across a quote broad range of niches, in addition to bonus extras and Nebula Originals.

Dropout seems to have a lot of success with a range of mostly unscripted comedy, centred around a core cast of trusted comedic actors with a larger range of guests.

Floatplane, on the other hand, seems much less successful, probably owing to its business model being basically Patreon's, but only for video. Instead of the wide range of content you get for surprisingly reasonable amounts of Nebula and Dropout, Floatplane ends up looking very expensive if you want to support more than one or two creators. Plus the creators on it haven't got the same degree of trust; it ends up reeking of the sort of techbro vibes that people are explicitly trying to get away from.

I'm not on my home computer to check right now, but this claims to have both torrent and direct download.

Not living up to your username there