It works.

Youtube is *much* better with the sound off!

(and even better with the monitor off, too . . .)

hawk

the contingency fee sounds unlikely.

Last I checked, they are only legal *at all* in the US, and a crime in all other Common Law jurisdictions.

And even in the US, they are illegal in divorces, save in California.

hawk, esq.

The bubble is bursting. These days, you need about a million views per month, every month to have a career on YouTube that actually pays the bills. For one person. If someone else does the video editing for you, add their cost.

A million views equals $5k. The kids realise that as soon as they don't live at home anymore. Pretty much all big YouTubers theses days make their money from Patreon, merchandise or sponsors.

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.

Gingrich served four years as speaker, to Clinton's eight.

it's 94-96, the end of Clinton's terms, and the beginning of Gingrich, when they were competing that produced the deals that actually balanced it. It did *not* happen while Clinton had Democratic majorities, nor did it happen later with Republican majorities under Bush.

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.

It's true that there is the assumption that technology and innovation will reduce interstellar travel times drastically, the way they have reduce travel across an ocean from many weeks to a few hours.

I do agree that most people probably are off by at least two orders of magnitude in estimating realistic interstellar travel times. With technology we can predict as probably going to happen, we're still on the order of hundreds of years to even nearby star systems.

Unless some magical technology breaks the light-speed barrier, space will not be "another ocean".

However, star-faring civilisations are still possible. They wouldn't be any kind of space kingdom, but independent star systems that just happen to have a common ancestry. They would certainly communicate, and the technology for that basically exists already, at least in the nearby area ( And if we can only travel to a few of the nearest stars, would we want to? Is there anything there we want?

Humans do a lot of things simply because we can. And what is vast resources today isn't so much tomorrow. Just 200 years ago, all the gold in the world wouldn't have enabled you to fly to another country for a quick visit to relatives. King, pope, peasant, no difference, simply wasn't possible. Today, anyone with an average income can do it.

So in another 200 years, who's to say that a space ship to a nearby solar system is not well within the budget of a wealthy nation?

Cinemas essentially killed themselves in the early 2000s, at least over here in Europe. There used to be local cinemas everywhere, with one or at most 2 main halls and 2-4 small ones. The main hall or halls showed the Hollywood blockbuster of the month and the smaller ones the other movies, the ones that didn't fill the main hall.

Then all of those local cinemas started disappearing and were replaced with the massive cinemas we have today, with 10+ main halls and no small ones (or "small" ones the size that the main hall of local cinemas used to be). I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been there where these massive halls were filled to even somewhat near capacity. Most of the time you can pick wherever because there's 2-4 people per row. Make it 10% full if you want to be generous.

Of course that's not viable. They thought economy of scale. They thought they can have more efficiency than the local places by having fewer cashiers and popcorn sellers per customer. They thought on paper and not in the real world.

And to have even a chance to fill those halls, the only movies that they could show were blockbusters.

spot on

I can recommend to everyone to have at least one non-geek good friend. I'll reset your understanding of how "easy" tech actually is.

Or a photo from 30 years ago that looks nothing like them today, but if asked they can truthfully say that yes, it's a photo of them.

I think Apple doesn't understand what it had with the big iMac.

I still have my 2017 one around. When it came out, it was revolutionary. A full 5K display with a reasonable CPU and GPU at a very reasonable price. Built-in webcam and speakers. The only necessary cable was power (if you went bluetooth keyboard and mouse). A wonderfully uncluttered desktop with a mean machine that also looks nice.

Why would I make many steps back from that?

I've done the math last year. I also thought Mac mini + Studio Display (it's not that much more expensive than a good 4K display) would do it, but it turns out that once you upgrade the Mac mini to something actually useable for desktop work, you're not that far from a Studio price-wise.

I really, really, really wish someone took a big fence post and hammered some sense into the idiots at Apple.

They have. I've seen such in several different offices.