Everyone (including Slashdot) is presenting the study wrong. It's forecasting that world incomes would drop by nearly a fifth relative to what they would have otherwise been, not relative to the present.

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.

I drive an elderly light sedan and a modern EV regularly and the dinocar stops noticibly shorter than the EV despite having lackadaisical brake and tire maintenance. The EV has monster acceleration but its weight (roughly 2x) makes stopping the victim of physics.

The EV has antilock brakes and 20+ years newer tech but still needs more room to stop! Normally it doesn't matter. I don't touch the EV brakes very often - usually once a month to keep them from rusting up. I drive single pedal using motor braking unless there is an emergency.

Spot on.

More people will do real porn too, because they can always claim it was a fake.

Don't forget about Prima Nocta.

That creepy King Charles face on your wedding night...

It's not just a question of whether it's justifiable. It's just simply nonsense to think that they can enforce this. Anyone can run Stable Diffusion on their computer. There's a virtually limitless number of models finetuned to make all kinds of porn. It's IMHO extremely annoying all the porn flooding the model sites; I think like 3/4ths of the people using these tools are guys making wank material. Even models that aren't tuned specifically for porn, rarely does anyone (except the foundation model developers, like StabilityAI) specifically try to *prevent* it.

The TL/DR is: if you think stopping pirated music was hard, well, *good luck* stopping people from generating porn on their computers. You might as well pass a law declaring it illegal to draw porn.

Light exposure, depth, degree of exposure, isolated from others or clustered... many factors can affect survivability.

They are only addressing the economic argument, not the human rights argument.

Typical for EU bureaucrats.

ECB, World Bank, EU, BIS, IMF, NATO - one big incestuous club.

Some day ... when search engines are invented, I won't have to write down your references to look up at the library next week.

TIL:

apt-get install git-lfs
git-lfs clone (huggingface repo url)

regular git clone gives you tiny pointer files.

PS Thanks, Babs!

Details laid out in the indictment underscore the failed economics involved in the mining of most cryptocurrencies

Not really, in fact that's a pretty dumb claim to make. The economics of mining Bitcoin (or other Proof-of-Work cryptos) as they would normally be commercially mined is very different from the economics of mining such cryptos on jacked general purpose AWS instances or whatever. The economics former clearly works, otherwise the companies that do it would go bankrupt and disappear. The latter works for the guy doing the mining because he isn't paying for the jacked accounts, so he really doesn't care how much the resources he's using cost or how inefficient his activities are, but that has absolutely no bearing on normal commercial Bitcoin mining.

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.