I wonder where they went?

This alone is enough to answer why people need to vote for Biden next term!!!

Lol, well *I* thought it was funny:-P. You might get fewer fake internet point reductions if you threw in a /s.

I would consider going to https://www.cc.com/shows/the-daily-show when Jon Stewart returns (that man has such grace and class, nobody since comes close), if they offer full-episode videos within a week of airing whereas YouTube does not. My point here is that there needs to be a REASON to go somewhere. YouTube combined both the “video hosting” and also “content aggregation” components, so even if we replace the former - and yes, some of us really WOULD choose to go to 8 different websites, for 8 different pieces of content that are worthwhile - it would get that much harder for someone to even know that the videos on the other places exist.

On top of that, when you just happen to be on YouTube, it suggests something that you might want to watch - a related video, e.g. George Carlin perhaps - and you can enjoy watching that. Whereas 8 different websites are going to have at most 1/8th of the content, and probably several orders of magnitude less than that realistically. So as long as the ads are not TOO burdensome - let’s say limited to 5s each and at most 2 of them - they will “win”.

Also, I really do want Jon Stewart to get credit for my having watched one of his videos, yet watching the identical video from like Vanced or Piped or something deprives him of those tracking metrics, which are worth a lot more than mere money (which at this point he’d likely just donate to charity or some such).

YouTube wormed their way into our hearts, like an abusive spouse, and now just dares us to divorce them - they push the edge as far as they possibly can, knowing that we hate them now yet not caring one bit, unless enough of us will ACTUALLY go. At which point they’ll lawyer or buy out the other place that we would go to, in an effort to drag us back in, kicking and screaming. It’s a horribly abusive model for a “relationship”, where our consent really doesn’t matter at all, only what they can get away with, by any means necessary. And the sad fact is that many of us have greatly reduced the amount that we watch such videos entirely, but that makes next to no impact on them at all. So long as they can sell US as the product to advertising companies by being “THE” place to put their ads, they will continue their parasitic chokehold on our society.

I like Lemmy too - it is not even trying to replicate other social media sites (well, it is but it cannot succeed, so we accept that about it), and while it has enormous technical hurdles, e.g. every single time I visit my instance in via a browser, whether desktop or mobile, I have to re-login again, and sometimes (rarely) even while browsing internally. That’s… not ideal, though it’s still a million times better than the toxic filth crowd that is Reddit (having more to do with culture than technology ofc, and yet the two are not entirely unconnected). Whereas other places, such as Mastodon, just seem doomed internally b/c by their very nature “everyone else” has to go there too or it just won’t work. Otherwise, you still need like a Xitter account to follow them, and a Facebook account to follow them, and so on (I actually do not have either, but I understand that some people will feel the need to).

Buying in brick-and-morter is facilitated by having a car, even in a city, otherwise it gets really rough trying to go without that, especially for even the smallest furniture items like a chair that you’d basically have to pay for delivery. It can be done, but does get difficult.

Back to YouTube though, yeah you go where you can find the goods. I haven’t used torrents for almost a decade, ever since getting a letter from my ISP about usage of those tracked ports. Fortunately streaming - yes I literally have a Netflix account, plus the occasional whatever - covers so very much ground, if not all, and for the tiniest fraction of the amount of effort involved in keeping up with things e.g. setting up and paying for a proxy. It’s literally as easy as searching for 1-2-3!:-P

Do you know any replacements for these btw?

Like Lemmy somewhat replaces “social media”, except I also used Facebook as a bit of a LinkedIn (b/c the latter was never good, it was instead always predatory), but people in general simply aren’t going to make an account on Lemmy, no matter how much you might wish that.

And Amazon, I basically don’t buy stuff anymore except from brick-and-morter stores these days - it’s like I’ve gone backwards two decades b/c you can’t trust anything online anymore! (maybe the online equivalent of the brick-and-morter I suppose)

For Google I use DuckDuckGo. Ironically AI is poised to somewhat clean up search results by putting those up top, except soon enough those will start to become monetized too, like you can have the “free” search results but if you want the AI-enhanced ones then you gotta poney up the dough, in a manner analogous to YouTube these days.

As for how all this happened, the story that I heard was that companies exploited legal loopholes wherein if they reinvested their profits into creating new ventures, they could effectively avoid paying a great deal of their taxes. Thus, like mushrooms beneath a forest, they grew and grew and grew and grew and now you cannot take one step without them lying underneath. Like how virtually the only competitor to iOS these days is Android, which at one point was an open-source project!!! They lay in wait, pretending to be a friend - maybe even thinking themselves that they were - until it was time to monetize, and then they pounced. Before YouTube, there were several other video hosting sites. But. Not. Anymore. They under-cut the competition, “donating” their profits from other enterprises into making them awesome, and now they own us, instead of the other way around. And now today, as you say, there are all these 10, 11, 12 minute videos (b/c there’s an incentivization to hit that “10” mark), out of something that would have worked far better as a 1-5 sentence text paragraph, so now you have to watch 10 minutes of unsearchable video to find the same information that 30 seconds of reading would have told you far better. Don’t get me wrong, SOME videos are freaking AMAZING! But most are total crap.

And… I do not know of a replacement for YouTube. Yes, I know of some other video hosting sites, some even grab YouTube videos directly, but nothing else comes even remotely close to allow a realistic comparion. e.g. Kursegat is AMAZING, and they put their videos onto YouTube, for their own monetization. I can bypass YouTube, but to watch what, not just go where?

And TV too as you said - there’s very little worth watching, see e.g. Stranger Things. Oh well, we all need to work our butts off anyway, to save up for the impending apocolypse or whatever.

At one point I literally walked away from a cushy job to try and help people (thankfully I got it back when that did not pan out), and do you know what I learned? That you cannot help people who refuse to be helped. Ignorance is trivially easy to cure (by comparison) - all it takes is knowledge. Whereas obstinancy… I do not know that there is a cure. MAYBE motivation, through personal pain unlocking a willingness to consider new possibilities that comfort previously made unnecessary? If so, then there is “hope” for us after all… b/c we are all about to suffer great pain as the internet, and in the wider view the enshittification of MANY areas of life, continue to get MUCH worse.

No matter who wins the next USA election. Though not equally.

I did not make it but I presume it is old yes, bc e.g. Amazon at one point used to have trustable reviews, but it’s been a minute since then!? I assume intent means production effort e.g. making things shared on Facebook takes seconds, whereas to shoot a porno takes at least minutes to hours. An alternate explanation could be to have intent be a surrogate for Web Traffic - although in that case, wouldn’t Facebook be much higher? Unless this is once again bc it is so old, prior to when it started taking over people’s lives e.g. games that stay-at-home mothers could play all throughout the day. Similarly, YouTube at one point looked poised to take over television itself back when the videos made were more of less simply using YouTube as another delivery vehicle, but they were funny as hell, or perhaps informative like a college class, etc. Now… I don’t know what happened, but TV sucks and YouTube sucks and we all merely look at memes, apparently.:-P

Anyway I liked how it shoved porn into only a single corner, as in it is high in one dimension but not all such, but for the rest of the details yeah it is too old to have any further relevance to modern society:-).

That is only one corner of it.

I mean, only like 3 comments out of ~116 total, but yeah, they were solid mentions I agree.

Very rarely there may be something that you need. Even so, it is becoming increasingly rare to find that knowledge. Spez decided that he owns it now, though some of us here happen to disagree:-).

Nor do you need a mobile app to use Reddit in any case:-). Anyway I think I am with you - we almost hear more about how Reddit is doing here in the Fediverse than we did back when we were on Reddit:-).

It is possible that both are true.

Some subs did not protest at all. Some users even went into subs dedicated to discussing the topic like Reddit Alternatives and anti-protested, and still others went so far as to brigade many small, entirely unrelated niche subs, taking over polls asking the actual MEMBERS of those subs what they wanted to do, making any discussion of the situation held hostage by a toxic barrage of venomous filth, often by accounts that seemed to have been created for just that purpose in mind due to their highly suspicious age. In my own sub, we had to record comments by hand b/c we felt that we could not trust automated polling as a result.:-(

Some subs shut down for merely a day or two (as mine did). A few more shut down for a little longer - measured in days to weeks.

But several subs, including some of the top ones on the entire site, shut down for MONTHS. And some even shut down permanently, only to have their decisions overturned by Reddit who sent in scabs to open them back up, months later.

So… it was a spectrum ofc, and perhaps the subs you were interested in were primarily affected for a couple weeks. But on the whole, the long tail of the protests lasted much longer than a mere few days, or even weeks, and the likes of John Olivier pic spam lasted for months.:-)

Valid, but from a truth-in-reporting standpoint, those protests went on for MONTHS and MONTHS. Which I suppose could technically be reported as “weeks”, but they could also be reported as “femtoseconds” and yet… seems to lose accuracy that way? :-P

And like, I understand that the title of the article means that it is focusing narrowly on third-party apps not the state of Reddit as a whole, but (1) the scope still includes anything that it does choose to say, e.g. how long those protests lasted, and (2) it does not mention anywhere how e.g. third-party apps compare to the official Reddit app, or what their market share is with respect to one another, which seems the two most relevant questions of all?!

Continuing on, a third question could be: do people like those apps? From the comments even in the article, it seems not… but without usage stats, even an app used by a single person counts the same as e.g. the former Apollo.

i.e., How DOES the third-party app market look nowadays, after the protests? After reading this article, I still have no idea whatsoever… All I know is that there is a list of apps, which sounds like a singular detail devoid of any context that Reddit would very much like us to know, rather than anything that I would actually care about knowing in order to get a better picture of the situation as a whole.

But that’s just my two cents.:-)

TLDR: not worth reading the article, it’s just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.

Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”. It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests lasts (edit: lasted) for “weeks” - not the more truthful “months”, not “permanent changes”, but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.

I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as “news”.

moonleay is already fairly cool - maybe use that!?:-P

Google: