The algorithm is likely optimising not for your pleasure but for ad revenue.

I see a TON of what is essentially an entire video of product placement, thinly veiled as "10 kitchen gadgets you need to know" or "12 new must-have tech gadgets", probably because a year ago I clicked on one or two of those before realising that they're not really interesting tech news but just full-out advertisement.

It keeps doing that even after I've clicked a ton of them away as "not interested".

It also keeps recommending me old videos from my subscribed channels that I've already watched. WTF?

The algorithm is shit these days.

Revenue is a bullshit number. YT keeps its actual profits (which is the number that matters) a secret.

I should be more specific, though. I mean "dying" not in the immediate sense, that's why I said slowly and it'll be around for years to come. But the time where everyone wanted to be a YouTuber because it's easy money are over. You need over a million views per month, every month to make YouTube a viable career choice these days.

Lots of even big channels these days are largely and openly finances by Patreon or sponsors. That means that they are no longer tied to YouTube in any meaningful way. Which means the platform is now interchangeable and the moment a competitor appears with similar numbers of users, the content creators can move elsewhere.

I was there when the dot-com bubble burst (for some reason I hear that in the voice of Elrond in my head, despite it's not actually that long ago, anyway) - I saw first hand how quickly your entire business can disappear when your only leg is "I'm very popular and have lots of users". The first company I worked for went from "we're in the top three" to "we're a subsidiary of someone else and btw 90% of you can go" in a week.

Again, no.

I do realize that most advertisement these days is not a direct incentive to buy but brand marketing.

What do you think does it do to your brand imagine if your brand keeps pissing me off? My ex insisted on using YT for music over loudspeakers and to do that from her phone (no adblocker). I'm a man, but if for whatever reason I ever find it necessary to buy women's period products, I know which brand I absolutely for 100% will completely avoid.

These actually likely served a purpose. If some other company made an exact copy of their mask, they could go to court and immediately prove that it was a copy. It's the chip design equivalent of the "Stolen from Apple" art hidden inside the Mac ROM code so that if someone tried to sell a clone similar to what happened with the Franklin Ace, they would potentially have an easy way to prove in court that the code was copied.

Limits on transferring tickets creates the potential for people to be stuck with tickets and forced to go back to TicketMaster to resell them, where they make additional profit, which gives them a perverse incentive to allow bots to buy tickets, because they get to profit on the same sale more than once, raising the price each time the tickets get resold.

Without those limitations, you'd be able to legitimately resell tickets anywhere, and companies wouldn't be afraid of allowing resale. As a result, almost nobody would go through TicketMaster and pay their high fees, so TM would have more incentive to truly fix the problem.

Combine that with an exception to the transferability mandate if and only if the seller offers a 100% refund policy (with no fees), with tickets becoming transferrable after refunds become unavailable.

If you pass a law written like that, TM will have a strong incentive to lock things down a lot — specifically, they could:

• Require all tickets to be transferred to an app on one or more specific people's phones.
• For people who don't have smartphones, allow them to pick up physical tickets in person with a photo ID, but only within one week of the event.
• Allow people to return tickets up to a week before the show for a refund.
• Allow people to transfer tickets within the last week, either by converting an electronic ticket to a physical ticket in person or through their app.

That sort of policy should (I think) make scalping largely impractical, because most scalpers aren't going to want to risk buying tickets months ahead of time if they can't sell them anywhere until a few days before the show.

What you're saying is that you consider living in a manner consistent with being above the poverty line to be a luxury, and people should be taxed on it. And that attitude justifies, at least in your mind, raising taxes on the middle class — even the lower middle class who often struggle to get by.

And because your tax proposal applies only to things that normal people buy, while mostly ignoring true luxuries, such as yachts bought overseas, and completely ignoring securities, butlers, maids, personal drivers, personal pilots, and other things that the wealthy tend to spend their money on, it shifting most of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class, which is what pretty much every economist who has ever looked at this plan has concluded it will do, but you're okay with that, because apparently in your mind, not being dirt poor is a luxury that should only be allowed for those who can afford it.

Start by passing a law that makes it unlawful to make anything non-transferrable, whether it is a concert ticket or a software license. That one law would do more to fix this problem than anything else.

One of my friends once pointed out to me that 10 Things I Hate About You is basically Taming of the Shrew in a different setting, and my perspective on movies has never been the same since. So how many of those 7% were still retellings of existing stories, but with enough changes to make them not be flagrantly "based on existing IP"?

If the people using public chargers during the day don't have a charger at home, then by definition, they're not part of that 6 P.M. surge, and are thus effectively reducing its magnitude compared with what it otherwise would be.

Remember that the 10x number that I was arguing against is a hypothetical future state in which everyone has an EV and charges at home, not a power deficit that currently exists and that we need to fix, so if a third of apartment dwellers are never able to move to home charging, it does reduce that number considerably.

And even if the apartment complex owners eventually tear down and rebuild the apartments and thus have to comply with the new building code requirements forcing them to put in charging infrastructure, it still potentially kicks the can down the road for several decades, thus reducing the urgency of dealing with that hypothetical load.

There isn't any meaningful competition.

I've tried Rumble myself both as a viewer and as a content producer (very small channel), and it's just... not even in the same league, barely on the same continent.

But there's always a chance a competitor suddenly appears when some VCs with deep pockets decide it's worth the gamble.

Absolutely not. The YouTube customers are the people buying ads on the platform.

YouTube is fleecing them by raising the number of ads they can bill them for, even though they're force-showing them to visitors who have very clearly expressed that they don't want ads and are more likely to hold the ads against the customers who paid for them than see them as an incentive to buy or as a positive brand-image thing.

And that's exactly what YouTube is doing.

YT is dying. Slowly, and it'll be around for years, but it's dying. The algorithm is starting to fail in very obvious ways, like recommending you the same videos constantly, despite you've scrolled past them a hundred times before. The content has become thinly veiled advertisement in addition to the actual advertisement they shove down your throat in increasingly aggressive manner. Most of the large content creators don't make much money anymore on YouTube and would probably jump ship the moment a competitor with a comparative audience size appears.

They're desperately trying to keep the cash cow alive somehow. And when you run out of ideas to innovate and make a good product, you start to ask yourself how you can fleece your customers for more.

While technically true, that definition of "abuse" has to include things like fast charging, bringing the cell close to 100% state of charge, charging when it's too cold outside, allowing the battery to get too warm, and starting to drain the battery immediately after charging. With the exception of charging to 100%, all of those are things that many car owners can't really avoid. So you can't really just wave your hands and say "That's abuse," because such abuse is common enough for entire lines of products to have been recalled over it.

True, but not everybody has home charging available, either because they don't have a dedicated parking spot (apartments) or because they don't have adequate service amperage to their home (many mobile homes, many homes built before 1970 or so, etc.). In the short term, that's likely to be a pretty large percentage of EV buyers in major cities.

At which point NASA could presumably remotely trigger a reentry burn and plunge the thing down into the middle of the ocean as a giant fireball, cosmonauts included. Besides, the shuttle was designed way back in the 1970s. If you think there was any technology on there that the Russians didn't have two decades later, you're kidding yourself. :-)