Alcun Atirutan BBS

It's not like I didn't know full well that it was gonna happen, but boy howdy is saying any nice thing about Large Internet Company on Mastodon quite the exercise.

I'm just another noodle on the internet - what do I know?

But perhaps if any mention of a mainstream anything invites You're Doing it Wrong and you Should Feel Bad About Your Opinions as responses by default... maybe this place isn't so fun.

To be clear, I ain't leaving - I do enjoy this place and its mission.

But be careful how you proselytize it.

@CptSuperlative I honestly think people are stuck between wanting this idea to succeed and wanting to be in on a secret.

@TechConnectify people are gonna have a lot of feelings about a company with more power than most governments and somehow even less accountability - as always though, taking those out on your average noodle is pretty unreasonable!

@depereo And just like everyone, I'm uneasy with this reality.

But the same company also gives a *majority* of its ad revenue to the folks who are making the stuff that makes the website.

It would be super duper hard to spin up a competitor which can do that, which I know full-well. But that's the price a competitor will have to pay, and nobody seems willing to.

@TechConnectify For what it’s worth, I do fully agree with your assessment. I too wish they'd untangle Music from the rest and just make more options for users. Plus more transparency how things are divvied up between YT and the creators and how gets what and how.
But they also need to be more mindful about who they let advertise on their platform. Too often I see absolute garbage person insanity wrapped into ad form on there on videos I am absolutely sure the creator would be furious about.

@the_duke Oh absolutely. I wish they had some sort of ad integrity team - and frankly, if they don't spin one up yesterday I think they'll quickly find themselves in more trouble than they already are.

@TechConnectify So, turns out the refuge from the Torment Nexus are fairly hostile to giant landscape-chewing machines that create Torment Nexii, no matter how convenient and profitable they might be short-term.

@mdhughes Even when the person couched those thoughts -from the fucking start!- as conflicted.

It's real fun.

@TechConnectify The joy of having a sizeable online following is that at some point the number of followers who are--to put it bluntly--irredeemable dicks crosses a threshold where they end up costing enough mental overhead to make actual online interactions with people measurably less fun.

☹️

@Legit_Spaghetti Yeah, ya know there was a day when Twitter stopped being fun because suddenly I was a target to be punched up at. It was a frighteningly sudden shift.

Here, though, that's always been there from some subset. Mostly it comes up when my toots get boosted.

There's a brigade of folks who seemingly would rather see popular YouTube creators stay the eff away rather than, y'know, maybe try and normalize decentralized non-corporate social networking.

@TechConnectify
Is it so bad? I read through about half the comments on your original thread (judging by how far down the scrollbar went, so maybe I'm way off here) and I only found one that was clearly hostile towards you, a few that were critical of Google/Alphabet and a lot that agreed with you or engaged in a constructive exchange of ideas.

I'm not trying to troll here, but seriously wondering... how big would you say the ratio of idiots to sensible people is on here? In my experience it's not more than 5% assholes, most people seem to be very pleasant and polite even if they disagree with me.

@82mhz Heh, well, of course a fun thing about here on Mastodon is that you may not be seeing all the replies.

But, in fairness, I'm equally irked by unprompted holier-than-thou posturing and personal attacks. That may be coloring my opinion vs. yours, but to be honest I don't know how anyone wouldn't find that exhausting.

@TechConnectify This place does have its fair share of FOSS evangelist snobbery. I wish I could pretend I haven't contributed to it.

I don't get why some people didn't seem to expect a YouTuber to generally favour YouTube though. That's just... that's on them.

And fwiw, I actually also agree in paying creators directly as a way to support a business model without ads. I just don't trust the revenue split. Used to pay for premium, then patreon, then realized oop there's an affordability crisis

@TheCoolest I mean, as far as the YT Premium split, I also don't trust it!

That's my main beef with it - we as creators know generally that we're getting a good deal from it. But how much of the subscriber's fee is going to the music side of things is incredibly opaque, and thus we're forced to just take them at their word.

Still, though, I won't stop sticking up for the place that says "put your stuff here and we'll pay you for it" at least a little bit. It's got problems, sure. But c'mon.

@TheCoolest Nobody else is doing that without being terrible in some way, and TikTok can't really ever do that because of how ads are run (and YT shorts barely make any money for the same reason - ads against an individual video have clear account. Against a feed, it's super murky).

So yeah, YouTube/Google have plenty of issues, but who else is doing anything like this? That's the moat they have, and competitors won't (and, fairly, sometimes can't) copy it.

@TechConnectify I'd say I'm referring more to distrusting how much Google themselves take to grow into an even bigger company.

Even though paying them removes ads, Google is arguably the world's largest ad company, and part of me wonders how much of that money spent on removing ads for me goes toward expanding their ad business elsewhere. Maybe that's nonsense. I don't know.

In any case I'll probably start contributing to your patreon again once I can afford to not live with my parents 👍

@TheCoolest I appreciate that a lot, but please don't feel compelled to.

@TechConnectify
I had not considered that I don't even see all the responses here on my instance, that was my mistake.

And I didn't mean to belittle your criticism of your experience here, I hope it didn't come across like this. Personal attacks are an absolute no-go and it's a shame that some people behave like this towards anyone who doesn't share their opinion. And even very few toxic people can ruin your day.

@82mhz Oh, absolutely no ill vibes were received from you at all. No worries there.

@TechConnectify @TheCoolest Nebula, man.... Nebula

🍻

@ClintonAnderson @TheCoolest I generally like the concept of Nebula, but see they're a form of gatekeeper.

And as soon as Nebula wants to open itself to more folks, they'll need moderation teams. And then suddenly they have all the same issues that YT has, especially once enough stakeholders find some decision to be murky or offensive.

Most of YT's problems, IMO, are merely a result of their scale. Any such service, once big and broad enough, runs into these issues.

@ClintonAnderson @TechConnectify Actually I am curious what's really involved behind the scenes in signing up for Nebula, because clearly there are a lot of creators who are well aware of it without joining it...

I guess it's a different dynamic? To be on Nebula you have to join Standard TV, which is to say, in order to join it seems you have to get hired by a co-op? or am I getting it wrong there...

They're a co-op, right?

Idk I got their lifetime subscription

@TheCoolest @ClintonAnderson I don't know the structure really at all, but I will say that the lifetime subscriptions... concern me on a sustainability front.

@mycroft I appreciate this!

What's honestly really quite tiring is that, in a lot of ways, I feel like I have to be more careful here than I was on Twitter. **TWITTER**

It's a different sort of thing I need to protect myself from - but also it's a lot harder because it's fragmented. I knew what toes not to step on there.

Here? You never know, and sadly I'm not super confident that can ever be effectively sorted.

@TechConnectify I ran out of Spotify student discount a couple years ago and switched to YT premium and have enjoyed not needing an adblocker as well as access to music not available on Spotify.

@mycroft This is nothing against you and your advice (because it's solid!) but the whole notion that this place is infinitely tweakable to your desires is... a large part of the problem.

You break through whatever filter someone has set up and you. will. hear. about. it.

I think lots of folks have a hard time balancing priorities here - to the point of being self-destructive at times.

But I'll keep at it.

@RobertoC_73 and don't you dare criticize anything about it or try to make it more popular, because that's not what we're trying to do here.

@cafkafk @RobertoC_73 well, I didn't co-sign to everything on that toot.

But, you're doing the thing right now. If you don't want people like me here, then we won't be here.

@cafkafk @RobertoC_73 honest question: do you hear yourself right now?